Shell Programming and Scripting

I have a text file that contains a word on each line. I want to be able to use each word as a variable to be put into a URL. I have been trying to put together a for loop but I am not having much luck. So basically all I am trying to do is

for line in ~/desktop/test.txt
do
curl -s URL?queryinput=$line >>~/desktop/test2.txt
done

I think that I have to put this through awk but I can't seem to get the syntax right. I believe that I am going to have to go get that sed&awk book that I know is out there. All I have is Unix the Complete Reference and the section explaining awk is a little unclear.

Thanks..

Try this:

exec < inputfile
while read line ; do
echo line = $line
done

for i in `cat inputfile`
do
echo "i = $i "
done

Or to avoid using a wasted "cat" (basically a slightly re-jigged version of Perderabo's above...)

Code:

while read i
do
  echo "i = $i"
done < inputfile

Cheers
ZB

There is a bigger issue than just wasting a cat process. The result of
for i in `cat inputfile`
must be less than the max line size. This introduces an artificial limit on how much data the script can handle.