how to escape white space in bash loop list
- by MCS
I have a bash shell script that loops through all child directories (but not files) of a certain directory. The problem is that some of the directory names contain spaces.
Here are the contents of my test directory:
$ls -F test
Baltimore/ Cherry Hill/ Edison/ New York City/ Philadelphia/ cities.txt
And the code that loops through the directories:
for f in `find test/* -type d`; do
echo $f
done
Here's the output:
test/Baltimore
test/Cherry
Hill
test/Edison
test/New
York
City
test/Philadelphia
Cherry Hill and New York City are treated as 2 or 3 separate entries.
I tried quoting the filenames, like so:
for f in `find test/* -type d | sed -e 's/^/\"/' | sed -e 's/$/\"/'`; do
echo $f
done
but to no avail.
There's got to be a simple way to do this. Any ideas?
The answers below are great. But to make this more complicated - I don't always want to use the directories listed in my test directory. Sometimes I want to pass in the directory names as command-line parameters instead.
I took Charles' suggestion of setting the IFS and came up with the following:
dirlist="${@}"
(
[[ -z "$dirlist" ]] && dirlist=`find test -mindepth 1 -type d` && IFS=$'\n'
for d in $dirlist; do
echo $d
done
)
and this works just fine unless there are spaces in the command line arguments (even if those arguments are quoted). For example, calling the script like this: test.sh "Cherry Hill" "New York City" produces the following output:
Cherry
Hill
New
York
City
Again, I know there must be a way to do this - I just don't know what it is...
