Question

Not sure why the last line does not cut the ” from the script:

#!/bin/bash

FILENAME=$1
while read line
do
cut -d '"' -f2
echo $line
done < $FILENAME

$ cat file

"1" test
"2" test
"3" test
"4" test
"5" test

If I run this script with the following command:

$ ./test file

2
3
4
5
"1" test

Answer 1

The loop executes once.

• It reads "1" test into variable $line.
• It executes cut -d '"' -f2 which reads lines 2-5 of the file (because that is the standard input at the time) and prints the number.
• It echoes what it read as the first line.

Fix:

cut -d '"' -f2 $FILENAME

If, on the other hand, you want to get the numbers into a variable, you could do this in a variety of ways, including:

cut -d '"' -f2 $FILENAME |
while read number
do  # What you want
    echo $number
done

or:

while read line
do
    number=$(echo "$line" | cut -d '"' -f2)
    echo $number
done