Re: Bash scripts and multi-word filenames

[Beat Seeliger <beat.seeliger@imis.ch>]

On Sat, Aug 05, 2006 at 03:45:26PM +1000, John O'Hagan wrote:
> Hi, 
> 
> I keep running into this particular gap in my scripting, and hope someone can 
> clear it up for me.  
> 
> FILES=$( ls SOMEWHERE )  #or find or grep, etc
> 
> for FILE in $FILES; do SOMETHING; done
> 
> I often find that if there are spaces in the names of anything in $FILES, the 
> execution of SOMETHING occurs separately for each word in the name, producing 
> unexpected results.
> 
> Quoting doesn't seem to help. Are there ways to deal with this?
> 

Hi John

You can overwrite Bashs internal field seperator variable (IFS) to
newline:

seb@zurich:~/test1$ IFS='
> '
seb@zurich:~/test1$ for f in `ls`; do echo $f; done
test
test 1

So Bash will stop treating whitespaces as list seperator.

Cheers  Beat