Bash foreach loop

I have an input (let's say a file). On each line there is a file name. How can I read this file and display the content for each one.

Solution 1:

Something like this would do:

xargs cat <filenames.txt

The xargs program reads its standard input, and for each line of input runs the cat program with the input lines as argument(s).

If you really want to do this in a loop, you can:

for fn in `cat filenames.txt`; do
    echo "the next file is $fn"
    cat $fn
done

Solution 2:

"foreach" is not the name for bash. It is simply "for". You can do things in one line only like:

for fn in `cat filenames.txt`; do cat "$fn"; done

Reference: http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/linux-unix-bash-for-loop-one-line-command/

Solution 3:

Here is a while loop:

while read filename
do
    echo "Printing: $filename"
    cat "$filename"
done < filenames.txt