Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi,

In ksh we use 'while read line' statement to read a file line by line. In my input file I have 5 spaces appended at the end of each line. When I use while read line statement it chops off the spaces at the end of each line

Inp.txt
aaaa<five spaces>
bbbb<five spaces>
cccc<five spaces>

pgm.ksh
#!/bin/ksh
while read line
do
len=`echo "$line" | wc -c`
echo $len
done

my_output
5
5
5

But my expected output should be,
10
10
10

Kindly help me on this.

Thanks in advance,
Chella.

You need to manipulate IFS to make spaces significant. Search for OLDIFS to see examples.

The read command splits the line into fields separated by white space by default. You can change this by redefining the inter-field separator (IFS). Try this:

Code:

#!/bin/ksh
while IFS="" read line
do
len=`echo "$line" | wc -c`
echo $len
done

awk '{print $0,length($0)}' FILENAME