Hi, I wrote the following code to read a file line by line #!/bin/ksh for i in `cat a.txt` do echo $i done This is not showing me the file contents line bye line. Instead I am seeing a word by word output. What is wrong ? DO I need to format the text file in some way that it reads the end of line char ? Please advise.

n=`wc -l < data.txt` i=1 while [ "$i" -le "$n" ] do line=`cat data.txt | head -$i | tail -1` echo $line i=`expr $i + 1` done Hope this helps.

Hi: Try this: #!/bin/ksh lineno=0 while txtline=$(line); do lineno=$((lineno+1)) printf "%s\n" "$txtline" # printf "%8d %s\n" "$lineno" "$txtline" done < a.txt Regards, Nails

Or this: while read linevar do print $linevar done < a.txt