Question

i was looking over the web for this but came up with nothing, i found this Q&A over stackoverflow Echo tab characters in bash script
but it didn’t help me.

i have an index of about 9000 lines, each line has one or two letters in Chinese.

any way i would like to rewrite each line so it will be the same only with space in the end. for example:

in the original index : AB

in the new index : AB

this is the script i wrote but it didn’t do the work it just put empty line after each item in the index, with no space, what am i missing???

this is the code tough:

 rm new_index.txt
 for line in $(cat index.txt)
   do
     echo "$line \t"  >> new_index.txt
   done

Answer 1

Try this

while IFS= read -r line ; do
    printf '%s \n' "$line"
done < index.txt > new_index.txt

This will preserve each line exactly but will append a space before each newline.

Note: the printf is not special, you could also say

echo "$line "

and get the same effect. The important thing is how you read the file.