How to loop through file names returned by find?

Question

x=$(find . -name \"*.txt\")
echo $x

if I run the above piece of code in Bash shell, what I get is a string containing several file names separated

Answer 1

You can store your find output in array if you wish to use the output later as:

array=($(find . -name "*.txt"))

Now to print the each element in new line, you can either use for loop iterating to all the elements of array, or you can use printf statement.

for i in ${array[@]};do echo $i; done

or

printf '%s\n' "${array[@]}"

---

You can also use:

for file in "`find . -name "*.txt"`"; do echo "$file"; done

This will print each filename in newline

To only print the find output in list form, you can use either of the following:

find . -name "*.txt" -print 2>/dev/null

or

find . -name "*.txt" -print | grep -v 'Permission denied'

This will remove error messages and only give the filename as output in new line.

If you wish to do something with the filenames, storing it in array is good, else there is no need to consume that space and you can directly print the output from find.