Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi,
I'm trying to read a file containing lines with spaces in them.

The inputfile looks like this
------------------------------
Command1 arg1 arg2
Command2 arg5 arg6 arg7
-------------------------------

The shell code looks like this...

lines=`awk '{ print }' inputfile`

for LINE in $lines ; do
echo ${LINE}
done

output is
--------------------
Command1
arg1
arg2
Command2
arg5
arg6
arg7
--------------------

What I really want is
--------------------
Command1 arg1 arg2
Command2 arg5 arg6 arg7


How do I do it..

TIA.

In most shells, the usual way to get an entire file into a variable is:

Code:

file=$( cat "$FILE" )

In bash (and ksh93) you can save a process with:

Code:

file=$( < "$FILE" )

But the usual way to read a file line by line in the shell is:

Code:

n=0
while IFS= read -r line
do
  printf "%3d: %s\n" "$(( n += 1 ))" "$line"
done < inputfile

Code:

IFS=$'\n'; for line in $lines; do

Thanks that worked!