Question

i tried to run this script :

for line in $(cat song.txt)
do echo "$line" >> out.txt
done

running it on ubuntu 11.04

when “song.txt” contains :

I read the news today oh boy
About a lucky man who made the grade

after running the script the “out.txt” looks like that:

I
read
the
news
today
oh
boy
About
a
lucky
man
who
made
the
grade

is anyone can tell me what i am doing wrong here?

Answer 1

For per-line input you should use while read, for example:

cat song.txt | while read line
do
    echo "$line" >> out.txt
done

Better (more efficient really) would be the following method:

while read line
do
    echo "$line"
done < song.txt > out.txt