Question

I am trying to write a script which reads a text file and saves each line to a string. I would also like the script to skip any lines which start with a hash symbol. Any suggestions?

Answer 1

You should not leave skipping lines to ksh. E.g. do this:

grep -v '^#' INPUTFILE | while IFS="" read line ; do echo $line ; done

And instead of the echo part do whatever you want.

Or if ksh does not support this syntax:

grep -v '^#' INPUTFILE > tmpfile
while IFS="" read line ; do echo $line ; done < tmpfile
rm tmpfile