Bash find files and loop contents

Taking from this repo @andrew8088/dotfiles/blob/main/install/bootstrap.sh I'm trying to use the existing code there to loop my MacOS $DOTFILES repo to find links.prop files, read the contents of the file and run the appropriate symlink.

The problem is when I run the bash install/boostrap.sh with the below snippet I don't get the expected results.

install_dotfiles () {
  info 'installing dotfiles'

  local overwrite_all=false backup_all=false skip_all=false

  find -H "$DOTFILES" -maxdepth 2 -name 'links.prop' -not -path '*.git*' | while read linkfile
  do
    echo $linkfile
    cat "$linkfile" | while read line
    do
        echo $line;
        local src dst dir
        src=$(eval echo "$line" | cut -d '=' -f 1)
        dst=$(eval echo "$line" | cut -d '=' -f 2)
        dir=$(dirname $dst)

        mkdir -p "$dir"
        link_file "$src" "$dst"
    done
  done
}

output

  [ .. ] installing dotfiles
/Users/username/github/dotfiles/zsh/links.prop
/Users/username/github/dotfiles/git/links.prop
  [ OK ] /Users/douglasbeaumont/.env.sh file already exists, skipping

  [ OK ] All installed!

It finds the files fine but won't read the contents.

zsh/links.prop has the line $DOTFILES/zsh/rc.zsh=$HOME/.zshrc.

Consider this sample script:

#!/bin/bash
printf '%s' 'test data' > testfile
while read -r line ; do
  echo "$line"
done < testfile

It prints nothing, but if you cat testfile it's clearly populated. What gives?

The problem here is that read exits with a non-zero status if it encounters end-of-file before a newline, which causes the while loop to terminate. If your file only has a single line and it's not newline-terminated, like testfile above, then it will look like the contents aren't being read but that's not actually the case.

If you can't guarantee every line is newline-terminated, then there is a workaround:

#!/bin/bash
printf '%s' 'test data' > testfile
while read -r line || [[ -n "$line" ]] ; do
  echo "$line"
done < testfile

The unterminated line will still cause read to exit non-zero, but because line is still populated you can follow that up with a check that there's something in it and process it before exiting the loop.