Shell Scripting

read line is stripping leading spaces

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Join Date: Jun 2007

Posts: 1

Reputation: jeromefong is an unknown quantity at this point

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jeromefong jeromefong is offline

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read line is stripping leading spaces

Jun 20th, 2007

I'm writing a Bash script to read from an input file and write my changes out to an output file. I'm using read and for some reason, it is stripping the leading spaces off of each line. I didn't see any flags in read to turn the stripping off. I'm also runnig this in cygwin, but I don't think that should matter.

The code I am using is something like this.
while read curline;
do
echo "current line " $curline
if [ ! -z "$curline" ]; then
while read outline;
do
echo "$curline" >> $Output_Work
fi
done < $Input_Work

Am I doing something wrong here?

thanks,

Jerome

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Join Date: Feb 2006

Posts: 17

Reputation: rusman is an unknown quantity at this point

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rusman

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Re: read line is stripping leading spaces

Jun 20th, 2007

In my very limited scripting experience, read will ignore spaces. You might be able to change that but I don't know how.

I have a read question, too, in another thread I just posted.

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Join Date: Feb 2007

Posts: 54

Reputation: radoulov is an unknown quantity at this point

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radoulov

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Junior Poster in Training

Re: read line is stripping leading spaces

Jun 20th, 2007

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Originally Posted by jeromefong

[...]
I'm using read and for some reason, it is stripping the leading spaces off of each line.
[...]

Consider this:

 Help with Code Tags 
 Shell Scripting Syntax (Toggle Plain Text) 
$ cat infile
a
 a
        a
$ while read;do
while> echo "$REPLY"
while> done<infile
a
a
a
$ while IFS= read;do
echo "$REPLY"
done<infile
a
 a
        a
$
$ cat infile
a
 a
        a
$ while read;do
while> echo "$REPLY"
while> done<infile
a
a
a
$ while IFS= read;do
echo "$REPLY"
done<infile
a
 a
        a
$