file reading in unix

Hi ,
I need to read line by line from a file. Can u please tell me the most efficient way to do it. SInce i will be reading more than 1000 files in my program. i am trying the following options :

1. nawk option
   nawk'{
   print $0
   }'files.temp

filecount=`cat files.temp | wc -l`
i=1
while [ $i -le $filecount ]
do
filename=`cat files.temp | head -$i | tail -1`
#echo $filename
done

can u please tell me the best way to do this.

while read filename
do
echo $filename
done < files.temp

thnx for the solution