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POHow can I escape white space in a bash loop list?
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copied!<p>I have a bash shell script that loops through all child directories (but not files) of a certain directory. The problem is that some of the directory names contain spaces. </p> <p>Here are the contents of my test directory:</p> <pre><code>$ls -F test Baltimore/ Cherry Hill/ Edison/ New York City/ Philadelphia/ cities.txt </code></pre> <p>And the code that loops through the directories:</p> <pre><code>for f in `find test/* -type d`; do echo $f done </code></pre> <p>Here's the output:</p> <pre> test/Baltimore test/Cherry Hill test/Edison test/New York City test/Philadelphia </pre> <p>Cherry Hill and New York City are treated as 2 or 3 separate entries.</p> <p>I tried quoting the filenames, like so:</p> <pre><code>for f in `find test/* -type d | sed -e 's/^/\"/' | sed -e 's/$/\"/'`; do echo $f done </code></pre> <p>but to no avail.</p> <p>There's got to be a simple way to do this.</p> <hr> <p>The answers below are great. But to make this more complicated - I don't always want to use the directories listed in my test directory. Sometimes I want to pass in the directory names as command-line parameters instead.</p> <p>I took Charles' suggestion of setting the IFS and came up with the following:</p> <pre><code>dirlist="${@}" ( [[ -z "$dirlist" ]] && dirlist=`find test -mindepth 1 -type d` && IFS=$'\n' for d in $dirlist; do echo $d done ) </code></pre> <p>and this works just fine unless there are spaces in the command line arguments (even if those arguments are quoted). For example, calling the script like this: <code>test.sh "Cherry Hill" "New York City"</code> produces the following output:</p> <pre> Cherry Hill New York City </pre>

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