Processing A Txt File One Line At A Time

I have written a program the uses

ls -R >/tmp/backup/list.txt

to generate a list of files.

It puts one file per line, i need to be able to go through the file one line at a time and run another program on that file.

so basically i need some kind of for...next loop for each line of the file

ive solved this problem

cat $file | while read line; do
...
done

$file is the list, and ... is the code to be run fr each line

so basically i need some kind of for...next loop for each line of the file
[/b]

Note, piping can get you in trouble, because the loop will be done in a subshell. You'll be scatching your head why variables after the loop don't reflect changes made within the loop ;-)

Some options:

while read line; do echo $line; done < your_file

while read line; do echo $line; done < <(cat your_file) # No space between <(
while read line; do echo $line; done < <(issue your_command here to generate list of files)

for line in "$(cat your_file)"; do echo "$line"; done
for line in "$(< your_file)"; do echo "$line"; done

Hope that helps with some of your options.

You should also be careful to quote any use of $line inside the loop because if you have a filename with spaces, the command will get more than one argument.

while read line
do
command "$file"
done < your_file