Iterate through list of filenames in order they were created in bash

Question

Parsing output of ls to iterate through list of files is bad. So how should I go about iterating through list of files in order by which they were first created

Answer 1

I've just found a way to do it with bash and ls (GNU).
Suppose you want to iterate through the filenames sorted by modification time (-t):

while read -r fname; do
    fname=${fname:1:((${#fname}-2))} # remove the leading and trailing "
    fname=${fname//\\\"/\"}          # removed the \ before any embedded "
    fname=$(echo -e "$fname")        # interpret the escaped characters
    file "$fname"                    # replace (YOU) `file` with anything
done < <(ls -At --quoting-style=c)

Explanation

Given some filenames with special characters, this is the ls output:

$ ls -A
 filename with spaces   .hidden_filename  filename?with_a_tab  filename?with_a_newline  filename_"with_double_quotes"

$ ls -At --quoting-style=c
".hidden_filename"  " filename with spaces "  "filename_\"with_double_quotes\""  "filename\nwith_a_newline"  "filename\twith_a_tab"

So you have to process a little each filename to get the actual one. Recalling:

${fname:1:((${#fname}-2))} # remove the leading and trailing "
# ".hidden_filename" -> .hidden_filename
${fname//\\\"/\"}          # removed the \ before any embedded "
# filename_\"with_double_quotes\" -> filename_"with_double_quotes"
$(echo -e "$fname")        # interpret the escaped characters
# filename\twith_a_tab -> filename     with_a_tab

Example

$ ./script.sh
.hidden_filename: empty
 filename with spaces : empty
filename_"with_double_quotes": empty
filename
with_a_newline: empty
filename    with_a_tab: empty

As seen, file (or the command you want) interprets well each filename.