feed multiple lines to bash variable from text file [duplicate]

Question

This is probably going to be marked as duplicate, but after reading several posts, I still can't make my bash script work. I have a text file with multiple lines; each line has 1 string only. I want to import the content to a bash variable, such as each line is a separate element. So, as an example, if MYVAR is the mentioned variable, I want to be able to access any element by its position, e.g.:

for i in $(seq 0 2)
do
        echo ${MYVAR[$i]}
done

The above is just an example; I do not need a for loop, that is why i have not used while read LINE strategy. I have tried several ways, but the file keeps being imported as 1 long string which includes the whole content. Hope my purpose is clear, I appreciate any help.

Why have you not used a while read loop?

123
– 123

2017-06-14 20:07:43 +00:00
Commented Jun 14, 2017 at 20:07 — 123
– 123, Commented Jun 14, 2017 at 20:07

Tamar · Accepted Answer · 2017-06-15 04:35:44Z

2

change the IFS to newline only, and read the file into array with ():

OFS=$IFS
IFS=$'\n'
MYVAR=($(<myfilename.txt))
for i in $(seq 0 2)
do
        echo ${MYVAR[$i]}
done
# setup the IFS to its original value
IFS=$OFS

edited Jun 15, 2017 at 4:35

answered Jun 14, 2017 at 20:05

Tamar

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1 Comment

Max_IT Over a year ago

Thank you, it worked! This morning, with a fresher mind, I reviewed my script. What puzzled me is that IFS by default should be space, newline and tab. Thus, the script above should work (and it does) even without changing IFS. I realized that one of my initial mistakes was to put a space after the '=' in 'MYVAR=($(<myfilename.txt))' That causes an error (weird?): syntax error near unexpected token `(' so I removed the outer parentheses, which put me on the wrong track. I just thought I would give you some feedback on your script. Thank you for solving my problem!

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