Executing commands containing space in Bash

Try changing the one line to eval $cmds rather than just $cmds

You can replace your script with the command

sh cmd

The shell’s job is to read commands and run them! If you want output/progress indicators, run the shell in verbose mode

sh -v cmd

Edit: Turns out this fails on pipes and redirection. Thanks, Andomar.

You need to change IFS back inside the loop so that bash knows where to split the arguments:

IFS=$'\n'
clear
for cmds in `cat cmd`
do
    if [ $cmds ] ; then
        IFS=$' \t\n' # the default
        $cmds;
        echo "****************************";
        IFS=$'\n'
    fi
done

I personally like this approach better - I don't want to munge the IFS if I don't have to do so. You do need to use an eval if you are going to use pipes in your commands. The pipe needs to be processed by the shell not the command. I believe the shell parses out pipes before the expanding strings.

Note that if your cmd file contains commands that take input there will be an issue. (But you can always create a new fd for the read command to read from.)

clear
while read cmds
do
        if [ -n "$cmds" ] ; then
        eval $cmds
        echo "****************************";
        fi
done < cmd