How do I capture the output from the ls or find command to store all file names in an array?

Question

Need to process files in current directory one at a time. I am looking for a way to take the output of ls or find and store the resulting value as elements of an array. This way I can manipulate the array elements as needed.

Answer 1

To answer your exact question, use the following:

arr=( $(find /path/to/toplevel/dir -type f) )

Example

$ find . -type f
./test1.txt
./test2.txt
./test3.txt
$ arr=( $(find . -type f) )
$ echo ${#arr[@]}
3
$ echo ${arr[@]}
./test1.txt ./test2.txt ./test3.txt
$ echo ${arr[0]}
./test1.txt

However, if you just want to process files one at a time, you can either use find's -exec option if the script is somewhat simple, or you can do a loop over what find returns like so:

while IFS= read -r -d $'\0' file; do
  # stuff with "$file" here
done < <(find /path/to/toplevel/dir -type f -print0)

Answer 2

for i in `ls`; do echo $i; done;

can't get simpler than that!

edit: hmm - as per Dennis Williamson's comment, it seems you can!

edit 2: although the OP specifically asks how to parse the output of ls, I just wanted to point out that, as the commentators below have said, the correct answer is "you don't". Use for i in * or similar instead.

Answer 3

You actually don't need to use ls/find for files in current directory.

Just use a for loop:

for files in *; do 
    if [ -f "$files" ]; then
        # do something
    fi
done

And if you want to process hidden files too, you can set the relative option:

shopt -s dotglob

This last command works in bash only.

Answer 4

Depending on what you want to do, you could use xargs:

ls directory | xargs cp -v dir2

For example. xargs will act on each item returned.