read line is stripping leading spaces

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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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jeromefong

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Jun 20th, 2007

Re: read line is stripping leading spaces

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.

rusman

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Jun 20th, 2007

Re: read line is stripping leading spaces

Click to Expand / Collapse Quote originally posted by jeromefong ...

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

Consider this:

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
$

radoulov

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This thread is more than three months old

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