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I'm having a hard time reading a file stored in a variable. it should be straightforward but somehow I'm missing something, can't find out what?

count=0 
mip="$(<fila.txt)"
while read -r line
do
  count=`expr $count + 1`
  echo "line $count "   
done < $mip

it's a really basic and simple script which count the number of lines like so, but when I used a variable done < $mip instead of the file name done < fila.txt. the script just outputs the file content like cat fila.txt instead of counting the lines.

line 1
line 2
line 3
line 4
line 5
line 6

any ideas ??

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1
  • Don't read the contents of the file into a variable, just iterate over the file: done < fila.txt Commented Feb 21, 2017 at 17:53

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
2

done <$mip still assumes that $mip is a filename. It's not.

What you want is probably something like

printf '%s\n' "$mip" |
while IFS= read -r line; do
   printf 'line %d\n' "$(( ++count ))"
done

The more straight forward solution is

while IFS= read -r line; do
   printf 'line %d\n' "$(( ++count ))"
done <filea.txt

or even

cat -n filea.txt | sed 's/^ *\([0-9]*\).*$/line \1/'

That last command will use cat for enumerating the lines in the file and sed to delete the actual file contents.

Or, with awk, which is even more straightforward:

awk '{ printf("line %d\n", NR) }' filea.txt

Or, if you count the lines in the file first:

count=$( sed -n '$=' filea.txt )    # or:  count=$( wc -l <filea.txt )
printf 'line %d\n' {1..$count}
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3
  • or while … done <<<"$mip", if it's a non-ancient ksh. Commented Feb 20, 2017 at 23:34
  • Since you are using a pipe, all changes made to the count variable are done in a subshell, so the variable will only be useful in the loop Commented Feb 21, 2017 at 17:52
  • thanks it worked, and also for all the details it's really helpful to learn from the best, again thank you Commented Feb 22, 2017 at 3:48

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