Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi everybody, I am new to shell script. Please help me with this problem.
I have a file test.txt with the content like this:
I have a shell script test.sh like this

Code:

#!/bin/sh 

while read line
do    
    echo $line >> out.txt
done < test.txt

out.txt is expected to have the same content with test.txt. But here is the output.txt
laconfirm remote1 test.sh test.txt are files in the same folder.
It replaces the * in the original text.txt

Would you please tell me what is my problem and how I can fix it?
Thanks in advance.

Code:

echo "$line"

the best way to make an exact reproduction is like this:

Code:

while IFS= read -r line
do 
  printf "%s\n" "$line"
done < infile > out.txt

You save me! Many thanks

Wouldn't your code add an empty line at the end of the out.txt even if infile doesn't have one ?

Good question. No it would not add an empty line. An empty line would mean 2 consecutive linefeed characters. Or do you mean add a linefeed character if it isn't there? If a file does not have a linefeed at the last line then it isn't terminated and that line would then not be read by the read statement.

yes i meant that ...

Ah ok, thanks a lot for the explanations, i will sleep a bit less ignorant tonight ...

Without quote

Code:

echo "$line"

Why does it read all files in that directories?
Or why does it print those extra lines without quote?