need help for shell programming

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

My purpose was to print out all of name of students in a list.First of all,I created a file name "List" in /home/tuan/Desktop/Shell_programming as below

Tom
Henry
Ben
Linda
Marry

And my script "script" is

#!/bin/sh
path=/home/tuan/Desktop/Shell_programming/List
for student in $path
do 
echo "$student"
done

At terminal I did :

tuan@tuan:~/Desktop/Shell_programming$ chmod +x script
tuan@tuan:~/Desktop/Shell_programming$ /.script
tuan@tuan:~/Desktop/Shell_programming$ ./script
/home/tuan/Desktop/Shell_programming/List
tuan@tuan:~/Desktop/Shell_programming$

Why after executing, the script displayed

/home/tuan/Desktop/Shell_programming/List

If I would like to print out the name of student. What should I change the code for my script

2

First try changing yourself with someone who knows unix-shell before writing shell-scripts or at least someone who learns first and then writes code

Then, maybe change "$path" to `cat $path` in the for-statement

3

I would strongly recommend against using unix keywords as variable names. The word "path" is used for storing locations to find programs for a user. Try typing:

echo $PATH

to see what I mean.

Yes, uppercase vs. lowercase, but just a matter of there are enough places to make mistakes in unix scripting without causing an extra headache for yourself.

Also, take a look at the following:

> cat listingnm 
Tom
Henry
Ben
Linda
Marry

> cat listcontents 
#! /bin/bash

filesrch=listingnm
while read student
   do 
   echo "$student"
done < $filesrch

and the program execution

> listcontents 
Tom
Henry
Ben
Linda
Marry
4

@joeyg:thanks for your advice. It is helpful.