Read a file without losing its last line.
Handle spaces, backslashes, and a final line without a newline.
set -euo pipefail
while IFS= read -r line || [[ -n "$line" ]]; do
printf "[%s]\n" "$line"
done < names.txtExpected output EXAMPLE
[Ada Lovelace] [Grace Hopper]
Details
Requires Bash 4 or later. Save as snippet.sh and run bash snippet.sh in an empty working directory. The final condition retains a nonempty last line when read reaches EOF.
Tested on Ubuntu 24.04.5 LTS · · GNU bash, version 5.2.21(1)-release (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu) · bash 5.2.21-2ubuntu4; coreutils 9.4-3ubuntu6.3
Test inputs, results and environment
The exact published code ran in a dedicated Linux test container with prepared inputs. Snippet process uid 65534 with a read-only root filesystem and temporary working files. Networking disabled. Fixtures and output records are isolated from the application database. Testing covers this example and its stated checks, not every input, operating system, or runtime version. The Linux container shares its host's kernel; this is not a native Windows test.
- Architecture / host kernel
- x86_64 / 6.18.54.1-microsoft-standard-WSL2
- Snippet identity / locale
- uid=65534, gid=65534 (unprivileged process) / C.UTF-8
- Interpreter invocation
bash -euo pipefail -c <published code>- Container image ID
sha256:ec91410a8f6ec3e985830b5e3a0560306d36f8c1c5ccd91a6699abe707123fa3- Code SHA-256
5d2820d05d8520dc57852eb9dfb5a585d6d4aeb69873b525b51759f95a358ebd- Dependencies
- bash 5.2.21-2ubuntu4; coreutils 9.4-3ubuntu6.3
Test input setup
These are the prepared inputs used by the test harness. See Details above for the prerequisites and how to run this example.
printf 'Ada Lovelace\nGrace Hopper' > names.txt
Observed standard output
[Ada Lovelace] [Grace Hopper]
Exit code: 0. Standard error: empty. Validation: Exact stdout comparison. System-dependent values above are one recorded run.