Bash, For loop, Files with spaces
Dear Future Me,
Are you trying to iterate over filenames with spaces in them using a bash 'for' loop? And instead of iterating over the filenames, you wind up seeing a list of filename parts split by said spaces? Use case: you want to print out a list of unique extensions for all files in the current directory and below:
for file in `find . -type f`; do echo ${file##*.}; done | sort | uniq
If any filenames have spaces in them, you may see odd results. The answer? Set the input field separator (IFS) environment variable to the newline character (rather than the default space character):
export IFS=$'\n'
And voila.
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Also useful: find with -print0 and xargs -0 to use the ASCII 0 for separating values.
find [find args] -print0 | xargs -0 [xargs args]
Very useful when dealing with files with spaces
Good tip. Odds that I will remember it at a useful time are low. I'll just bug you whenever I try to do anything fancy with bash, and someday maybe you can point me back at this.
Thank you so much!