How to make 'print' or 'echo' keep leading blanks?

[Camogli]

Hi,

I simply want to read each line in a file, and then spit it out faithfully to STDOUT. The problem is when I use 'print' or 'echo' to spit out the line, the leading blanks are stripped, i.e. original " hahaha", after 'print' or 'echo', it becomes "hahaha". I need the lines to be intact. How do I do it??!!

Here is the snip of my script:

cat $filename | while read line ;do
print "$line"
done

Any clue is greatly appreciated.

Shalese

 

[scooter6]

Why not just do

cat $filename > newfile.txt

then print text file...if you need to get only specific
lines you can

cat $filename > grep "string" > newfile.txt

hope this helps

 

[Camogli]

I left out some details. ;-) I need to insert a block of text at a very specific place in that file.
Therefore, I need to read each line in order to find out if it's time to insert the block. I can't just use 'cat'.
Also, the "signaling" line does not appear in a fixed line number or anything.

Of course, if there is any good way to insert, be happy to hear about it too. I tried 'sed'. The problem is my file contains double quotes and all kinds of other goodies, it always causes "command garbled". :-(

Shalese

 

[mbr]

Hi,

if you have a file "chk" like this:

   with blanks
without
  with blanks again
without blanks but with "special chars"
 with blanks and \special chars$

you can use awk to insert text like that:

cat chk | awk '{if( $1 ~ /without/)print "insert"; print; }'

ciao, mbr