Textfile processing with bash

Today’s post will be a bash on liner that allows you to process text files, line-by-line.

while read line; do wget $line; done < urls.txt

In this case, urls.txt is a list of urls that we want to process using wget. $line is the value that we’re currently processing (the line of text).

This is a pretty heavy handed way of downloading a handful of URLs. You could much easier do it with xargs which I’d mentioned in a previous post. Anyway, the while way gives you a bit more room to breathe in your loops.