How To Read File Line by Line in Bash

This post will guide you how to write an Bash shell script to read a given file line by line in your Linux system.

You can use while read line construction to read a file line by line in bash shell.

For example, if you have a list of company name in a file named name.txt, and you want to read it line by line in a bash shell script, as followss:

$ cat name.txt

[devops@mydevops ~]$ cat name.txt
google
bing
yahoo
facebook
oracle

then you can create a bash script named readFile.sh, and add the following line into the file.

#!/bin/bash
FILE=$1
while read LINE; do
echo "line: $LINE"
done < $FILE

save and close the file. and you still need to make it executable with the following command:

$ sudo chmod u+x readFile.sh

Executing this script with the following command:

$ ./readFile.sh name.txt

Outputs:

[devops@mydevops ~]$ ./readFile.sh name.txt
line: google
line: bing
line: yahoo
line: facebook
line: oracle

Conclusion

You should know that how to read file line by line in a bash shell script in your Linux system.