Question

I have one file with a list of names. I need to loop through all names in this file from an external file with a shell script. How can I do that?

Example files:

scripts/names.txt

alison
barb
charlie
david

scripts/script.sh

NAMES="" #names from names.txt file
for NAME in $NAMES; do
    echo "$NAME"
done

How can I explode the names.txt file into an array in a separate shell script?

Answer 1

One way would be:

while read NAME
do
    echo "$NAME"
done < names.txt

EDIT:
Note that the loop gets executed in a sub-shell, so any modified variables will be local, except if you declare them with declare outside the loop.

Dennis Williamson is right. Sorry, must have used piped constructs too often and got confused.