Question

I’m parsing some .html files in Bash. I read the input with:

while read line 
do
   echo $line
   ...do something...
done < $file

Now I’ve expierenced something real strange. Some lines in the files contain something like

Resolution…: 720 * 576

But bash gives me this:

Resolution…: 720 mysript.sh another_script.pl 576

Bash expands the * char to the content of the actual directory. How can I read the text line by line without expanding.

Answer 1

the expanding happens in echo, not in read, you should quote your output:

echo "$line"