Shell Programming and Scripting

You're welcome, ksmarine1980.

MadeInGermany has already explained why IFS= was used.

The original description from man bash is as follows:

Code:

       IFS    The Internal Field Separator that is  used  for  word  splitting
              after  expansion  and  to  split  lines into words with the read
              builtin  command.   The  default  value  is  ``<space><tab><new‐
              line>''.

Due to the default value of IFS, lines containing preceding whitespaces won't be printed one-to-one.
One good example are various man pages (Note I used the bash man page in the demo ).

If your file has no leading whitespaces, you can remove IFS= from the code.

Note: in addition it is better to use printf rather than echo, because some implementations of echo interpret special character escapes by default, which may play tricks on your output.

So instead of

Code:

echo "$COUNT: $line"

it is better to use:

Code:

printf "%d: %s\n" "$COUNT" "$line"

--
@ksmarine1980: in your script

Code:

COUNT=($1-1)

is wrong. That should be:

Code:

COUNT=$(($1-1))