Re: help with quoting/expansion in bash

[David Kirchner <dpk@dpk.net>]

On 2/12/06, David Berg <drberg1000@gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm trying to write a for loop that descends into a list ofdirectories and runs a command.  I can't seem to get the quoting rightthough.  Most of the directories have spaces and they are makingthings difficult for me.  Here is what I have:
> for DIR in dir\ 1 dir\ 2 dir\ 3; do        cd $DIR        pwd        cd ..done
> The spaces in $DIR aren't escaped.
> Any help, including a pointer to the relevant part of TFM, is much appreciated.
> --Dave

Putting quotes around the $DIR variable is the solution here, however
there's another option which may come in handy: you can use "while"
loops instead of "for" loops. The problem with this option is that if
the programs within the loop take over stdin for any reason, the loop
will terminate prematurely (ssh does this, for example).

cat list.txt | while read DIR
do
cd "$DIR"; pwd; cd ..
done

(Btw: I'd recommend wrapping the cd with a if [ -d "$DIR" ]; then; fi
set of directives because while the cd "$DIR" may not always succeed,
cd .. always will.)