How can I execute list of commands from a file in Bash Shell Script

Question

I have a file "commands.txt" with some commands in it for example:

pwd
wc -l commands.txt

And when I run the following command, its not executing the commands.

export IFS=$'\n' (I did this so that I could avoid breaking up the command line from the file)
for i in `cat commands.txt`; do  $i; done

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Regards, RSR

Answer 1

Since you are setting IFS to \\n , your second line wc -l commands.txt is not being word-split correctly and is being treated as a single command instead of the command wc followed by parameter commands.txt . Do not set IFS , use a while loop instead

while read -r com; 
do 
    $com; 
done < commands.txt