Question

I am trying to write a simple shell script .
The script goes to a folder, loops through every file, and reads every line in each file and prints them.

Am I doing anything wrong?

cd "My Directory Goes Here"

for myFile in `ls`
for line in `cat $myFile`;
    do   
    echo "$line"   
    done 
done

Answer 1

You’re missing a do for the outer loop and you’re better off using $() instead of backticks (easier to read, easier to nest, and it should be understood by any modern /bin/sh). Also, you don’t need to call ls to get a list of files in the current directory, you can just use *:

# If you're trying to echo $myFile line by line and your lines
# may have embedded whitespace, then you'll want to change the
# input-field-separator to keep $(cat $myFile) for tokenizing
# the file on whitespace. If your files don't have whitespace
# in the lines, then you don't need to change IFS like this.
IFS=''

cd "My Directory Goes Here"
for myFile in *; do
    for line in $(cat $myFile); do
        echo $line
    done
done

The above will miss files like .dotfile but you can use find if you need those too:

for myFile in $(find . -type f -maxdepth 1); do
    # As above

And if you have to deal with files that contain spaces in their names then you’re better off using something other than the shell such as Perl, Ruby, or Python.