I use "| while read" as well, because it works well in a pipeline and handles embedded spaces. It doesn't handle embedded newlines, but in practice, real files have embedded spaces, while embedded newlines only happen in test cases and exploits. (You can do actual NUL-delimited reads with `-d ''`, but for a quick command-line operation that's generally not necessary, and if you're going to be that careful you probably also need `-r`.)