Ah, makes sense it would be targeted twards banking and financial businesses specifically. Better pinch point than some random commerce. In that case audits would be less problematic, though I’m not sure why outsourcing this data is even an option with the current rules. It’s not like a business can be completely hands off in the acquisition or processing of that info.

Out of curiosity, how?

< urls.txt while read -r url; ...

Is a syntax error.

while read -r url < urls.txt; ...

Result in an infinite loop.

I’m uninformed about this, but do KYC laws come into effect at some profit point or are they globally enforced. I don’t see how any small businesses could possibly afford a 3rd party audit, or how that would even scale. I agree it’s necessary, but logistically it seems problematic.

You can also avoid cat since you aren’t actually concatenating files (depending on file size this can be much faster):

while read -r url; do echo "download $url"; done < urls.txt

Tmux was purpose built for terminal multiplexing. You can assign session names for organizing and manipulating multiple instances. Send keys to and read output from detached sessions. It’s easy to script.

I’d recommend tmux for that particular use. Screen has a lot of extras that are interesting but don’t really follow the GNU mentality of “do one thing and do it well.”