Re: setting IFS to new line doesn't work while searching?

[Greg Wooledge <greg@wooledge.org>]

On Fri, Dec 15, 2023 at 01:42:14PM +0100, Nicolas George wrote:
> Also, note that file names can also contain newlines in general. The
> only robust delimiter is the NUL character.

True.  In order to be 100% safe, the OP's code would need to look
more like this:

    readarray -d '' fndar < <(
        find "$sdir" ... -printf 'stuff\0' |
        sort -z --otherflags
    )

The -d '' option for readarray requires bash 4.4 or higher.  If this
script needs to run on bash 4.3 or older, you'd need to use a loop
instead of readarray.

This may look a bit inscrutable, but the purpose is to ensure that
a NUL delimiter is used at every step.  First, find -printf '...\0'
will print a NUL character after each filename-and-stuff.  Second,
sort -z uses NUL as its record separator (instead of newline), and
produces sorted output that also uses NUL.  Finally, readarray -d ''
uses the NUL character as its record separator.  The final result is
an array containing each filename-and-stuff produced by find, in the
order determined by sort, even if some of the filenames contain
newline characters.