While Loop over a File returning command not found

Question

I'm Trying to create a simple shell script to loop through a file line by line and execute a command with each line as a variable.

Here is my Text File:

FakeAccount
FakeUser 

Here Is My Shell Script:

#!/bin/bash

while IFS= read -r line; do
    "echo -e 'testpassword\ntestpassword' | passwd $line"
done < "User.txt"

The Output i get back seems to be what i want, the output says:

"line 4: echo -e 'testpasswd\ntestpasswd' | passwd FakeAccount: command not found"

"line 4: echo -e 'testpasswd\ntestpasswd' | passwd FakeUser: command not found"

But if i copy this exact string: echo -e 'testpasswd\ntestpasswd' | passwd FakeUser

the command works just fine so why is the shell script not executing the command and its saying command not found?

Answer 1

By enclosing the command and their arguments into double quotes, you're presenting the whole string as a single command which is, as the shell tells you, not found.

The shell needs to perform word splitting in order to find command lists, assignments, commands, and their parameters (see the opening sections of man bash to learn more).

Don't use double quotes on the whole pipeline, just quote the variable:

echo -e 'testpassword\ntestpassword' | passwd "$line"

Answer 2

You could do it even simpler as follows using chpasswd:

while read -r user; do printf "$user:%s" "some_secret_pass" | chpasswd ; done < User.txt

Or if you want to use passwd then you'd probably need to pass the --stdin flag. As far as I can see, this is supported in recent Fedora and Centos releases

Using passwd:

while read -r user; do printf %s\\n "some_secret_pass" | passwd --stdin "$user" ; done < User.txt