Iterate over a list of files with spaces

Question

I want to iterate over a list of files. This list is the result of a find command, so I came up with:

getlist() {
  for f in $(find . -iname \"f         


        

Answer 1

Ok - my first post on Stack Overflow!

Though my problems with this have always been in csh not bash the solution I present will, I'm sure, work in both. The issue is with the shell's interpretation of the "ls" returns. We can remove "ls" from the problem by simply using the shell expansion of the * wildcard - but this gives a "no match" error if there are no files in the current (or specified folder) - to get around this we simply extend the expansion to include dot-files thus: * .* - this will always yield results since the files . and .. will always be present. So in csh we can use this construct ...

foreach file (* .*)
   echo $file
end

if you want to filter out the standard dot-files then that is easy enough ...

foreach file (* .*)
   if ("$file" == .) continue
   if ("file" == ..) continue
   echo $file
end

The code in the first post on this thread would be written thus:-

getlist() {
  for f in $(* .*)
  do
    echo "File found: $f"
    # do something useful
  done
}

Hope this helps!