Shell Programming and Scripting

If by special characters you mean IFS characters, it will not, and it cannot be made to do so. The shell splits the results of the find command on IFS characters (by default, space, tab, and newline). If a filename contains any of those characters, it is broken up into words and each word is fed to the loop one at a time. The only way to prevent the shell from field splitting the results of a command substitution is to double quote it, but that would always result in one word, and a loop that will only execute once (which isn't much of a loop, ).

An illustrative example using spaces, which aren't that uncommon:

Code:

$ touch 'i have spaces.txt'
$ ls 
i have spaces.txt
$ for f in $(find . -name "*.txt"); do echo "$f"; done
./i
have
spaces.txt

Note how the filename was mangled because it was split into three words. A better approach:

Code:

$ find . -name "*.txt" | while IFS= read -r f; do echo "$f"; done
./i have spaces.txt

That will handle everything except newlines in filenames, since find injects newlines into its output stream as a delimiter. While I agree that people using newlines in filenames deserve all the pain that a posix-compliant environment can throw at them, if such names need to be handled, the only posix-compliant solution I know of for a situation that requires recursion is (where myscript.sh is a shell script that does whatever needs doing with the filenames passed to it via positional parameters):

Code:

find . -name "*.txt" -exec myscript.sh {} +

Although it's not posix-compliant, the following is likely supported:

Code:

find . -name "*.txt" -print0 | xargs -0 myscript.sh

myscript.sh can then safely loop through the filenames, even if they contain a newline, using the following for loop:

Code:

for f; do
    ...process "$f"....
done

(when the for loop's list is absent, it defaults to "$@")

Regards,
Alister

---------- Post updated at 02:43 PM ---------- Previous update was at 02:28 PM ----------

Apologies, pantelis. It seems that your thread took a detour into bourne sh land, in no small part because of my comments. If you can switch away from csh to sh, you'll find that there are MANY more people able to provide assistance.

Regards and best of luck,
Alister

@alister, thanks for clarifying. I guess I generally use camelBack naming convention so I have not come across this before. I think I also assumed (I know, my bad) that the for loop would only use one delimiter. Since the find command would return multiple files, the new line would be the file name delimiter and the spaces would be used as part of the name.