Question

I have the following shell script. The purpose is to loop thru each line of the target file (whose path is the input parameter to the script) and do work against each line. Now, it seems only work with the very first line in the target file and stops after that line got processed. Is there anything wrong with my script?

#!/bin/bash
# SCRIPT: do.sh
# PURPOSE: loop thru the targets 

FILENAME=$1
count=0

echo "proceed with $FILENAME"

while read LINE; do
   let count++
   echo "$count $LINE"
   sh ./do_work.sh $LINE
done < $FILENAME

echo "\ntotal $count targets"

In do_work.sh, I run a couple of ssh commands.

Answer 1

The problem is that do_work.sh runs ssh commands and by default ssh reads from stdin which is your input file. As a result, you only see the first line processed, because the command consumes the rest of the file and your while loop terminates.

This happens not just for ssh, but for any command that reads stdin, including mplayer, ffmpeg, HandBrakeCLI, httpie, brew install, and more.

To prevent this, pass the -n option to your ssh command to make it read from /dev/null instead of stdin. Other commands have similar flags, or you can universally use < /dev/null.