Looping through the content of a file in Bash

Question

How do I iterate through each line of a text file with Bash?

With this script:

echo \"Start!\"
for p in (peptides.txt)
do
    echo \"${p}\"
done


        

Answer 1

@Peter: This could work out for you-

echo "Start!";for p in $(cat ./pep); do
echo $p
done

This would return the output-

Start!
RKEKNVQ
IPKKLLQK
QYFHQLEKMNVK
IPKKLLQK
GDLSTALEVAIDCYEK
QYFHQLEKMNVKIPENIYR
RKEKNVQ
VLAKHGKLQDAIN
ILGFMK
LEDVALQILL

Answer 2

One way to do it is:

while read p; do
  echo "$p"
done <peptides.txt

As pointed out in the comments, this has the side effects of trimming leading whitespace, interpreting backslash sequences, and skipping the last line if it's missing a terminating linefeed. If these are concerns, you can do:

while IFS="" read -r p || [ -n "$p" ]
do
  printf '%s\n' "$p"
done < peptides.txt

---

Exceptionally, if the loop body may read from standard input, you can open the file using a different file descriptor:

while read -u 10 p; do
  ...
done 10<peptides.txt

Here, 10 is just an arbitrary number (different from 0, 1, 2).

Answer 3

If you don't want your read to be broken by newline character, use -

#!/bin/bash
while IFS='' read -r line || [[ -n "$line" ]]; do
    echo "$line"
done < "$1"

Then run the script with file name as parameter.

Answer 4

Here is my real life example how to loop lines of another program output, check for substrings, drop double quotes from variable, use that variable outside of the loop. I guess quite many is asking these questions sooner or later.

##Parse FPS from first video stream, drop quotes from fps variable
## streams.stream.0.codec_type="video"
## streams.stream.0.r_frame_rate="24000/1001"
## streams.stream.0.avg_frame_rate="24000/1001"
FPS=unknown
while read -r line; do
  if [[ $FPS == "unknown" ]] && [[ $line == *".codec_type=\"video\""* ]]; then
    echo ParseFPS $line
    FPS=parse
  fi
  if [[ $FPS == "parse" ]] && [[ $line == *".r_frame_rate="* ]]; then
    echo ParseFPS $line
    FPS=${line##*=}
    FPS="${FPS%\"}"
    FPS="${FPS#\"}"
  fi
done <<< "$(ffprobe -v quiet -print_format flat -show_format -show_streams -i "$input")"
if [ "$FPS" == "unknown" ] || [ "$FPS" == "parse" ]; then 
  echo ParseFPS Unknown frame rate
fi
echo Found $FPS

Declare variable outside of the loop, set value and use it outside of loop requires done <<< "$(...)" syntax. Application need to be run within a context of current console. Quotes around the command keeps newlines of output stream.

Loop match for substrings then reads name=value pair, splits right-side part of last = character, drops first quote, drops last quote, we have a clean value to be used elsewhere.

Answer 5

#!/bin/bash
#
# Change the file name from "test" to desired input file 
# (The comments in bash are prefixed with #'s)
for x in $(cat test.txt)
do
    echo $x
done

Answer 6

This is coming rather very late, but with the thought that it may help someone, i am adding the answer. Also this may not be the best way. head command can be used with -n argument to read n lines from start of file and likewise tail command can be used to read from bottom. Now, to fetch nth line from file, we head n lines, pipe the data to tail only 1 line from the piped data.

   TOTAL_LINES=`wc -l $USER_FILE | cut -d " " -f1 `
   echo $TOTAL_LINES       # To validate total lines in the file

   for (( i=1 ; i <= $TOTAL_LINES; i++ ))
   do
      LINE=`head -n$i $USER_FILE | tail -n1`
      echo $LINE
   done