Shell Programming and Scripting

Say I have a text file, with several lines. Each line may contain spaces or the # symbol.

For each line, I want to pass that line as the path of a file, in order to add it to a tar file.

I've tried this but doesn't work:

Code:

cat contents.txt | xargs -0 `tar -uvf contents.tar $1`

Any ideas?

Note: I've tried tar with -T option but would like to do it another way.

I've tried as well this but separates lines containing spaces:

Code:

for i in $(cat file)
 do
 #do your stuff to $i here
 done

Code:

while read line
do
    #do stuff with $line
done < contents.txt

Or you can use your for loop with a minor modification:-

Code:

for i in `cat file`
do
   #do your stuff to $i here
done

But I don't recommend this approach, you can follow the method which balajesuri provided.

I've tried with xargs and says "Too many arguments" so I also think the while loop is the best bet since has no counter that can overflow I think.