How to write every line of a text file into new files and name them according to its content?

Question

I have have a text file with many lines like this:

Smith: ''Handbook of Everything.'' Fantasy Press, 2000.
Wilson: ''Unix for Dummies.'' Wiley, 1993.

I want to write every line into a new file. The new file should contain the whole line and should be named same to the line it contains.

Smith: ''Handbook of Everything.'' Fantasy Press, 2000.txt
Wilson: ''Unix for Dummies.'' Wiley, 1993.txt

How do I accomplish this? Thanks.

score 4 · Accepted Answer · edited Dec 28 '20 at 20:49

4

Using awk:

awk '{ fname=$0 "txt"; print > fname; close(fname) }' file

edited Dec 28 '20 at 20:49

αғsнιη

answered Dec 28 '20 at 20:06

Freddy

1

@αғsнιη Duplicate lines - good point, missed this one. No golfing award for me today :( – FelixJN Dec 28 '20 at 20:53
@Fiximan these days people are looking for hats : ) – αғsнιη Dec 28 '20 at 20:58

score 2 · Answer 2 · edited Dec 28 '20 at 19:52

2

If your textfile is called textfile, the following should do the job

while read -r x
do
    echo "$x" > "${x}txt"
done < textfile

edited Dec 28 '20 at 19:52

αғsнιη

answered Dec 28 '20 at 19:44

unxnut

Consider https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/65803/why-is-printf-better-than-echo – Kusalananda Dec 28 '20 at 21:03
And [Understanding "IFS= read -r line"](//unix.stackexchange.com/q/209123) – Stéphane Chazelas Dec 30 '20 at 13:40

bit · Answer 3 · 2021-01-06T23:33:55.673

1

You can create a bash script as shown below. Replace /tmp/textFile.txt with the absolute path to your text file.

#!/bin/bash
file=/tmp/textFile.txt
while IFS= read -r line
do
        printf "%s\n" "$line" > /tmp/"$line"txt
done < "$file"

edited Jan 06 '21 at 23:33

answered Dec 28 '20 at 20:57

bit

2

Why the `touch` part? Note that there's nothing bash-specific in that script. It's standard `sh` syntax. – Stéphane Chazelas Dec 30 '20 at 13:42
Point taken. It's good to know this script is portable to other shells, and can be executed using zsh for example. – bit Jan 06 '21 at 23:33

3 Answers3