[Techtalk] line by line in bash

[Maria Blackmore]

Hi :)

On Sun, 8 Jun 2003, Hamster wrote:
> In essence it boils down to the ability to process a file one line at a
> time.

Why not use "wc -l" to find out how many lines there are in the file, and
then use that to form a loop using a counter and "while" or "until"

You can then use a combination of head and tail with the counter variable
to extract a single line from the file at a time in the loop, and iterate
through it.

To extract a single line from a file, say, the 5th line, you would use the
following line

head -5 somefile | tail -1


There you go, you can now iterate a line at a time through the file :)

Maria