Processing a List of Files from an Input File

Gregg

Suppose we have a list of files stored in a text file and we want to perform an operation on each of them within a bash script. How would we go about doing that? Well, there are several options, here are a few.

$ cat input-files.txt file-1.txt file-2.txt file-3.txt file-4.txt file-5.txt file-6.txt file-7.txt file-8.txt file-9.txt

Now, if we want to operate on each file in this list we can do something like this:

while IFS= read -r filename do echo "Do something on ${filename} here..." done < "input-files.txt"

or alternatively,

input="input-files.txt" while IFS= read -r filename do printf '%s\n' "${filename}" done < "${input}"