Hi All
I need to put a bunch of specific files in a directory (with loads of other files), into a tar archive. The best way I thought of doing this was putting the filenames into a file, reading them line by line in a for loop, and then adding them to a tar acrhive.

However the filenames have spaces:

/the/path/to/the/file/the file name with spaces

So when I do a for x in `cat /listoffiles` etc, it doesn't work because the shell sees the spaces as separators, and hence the bits of the name as separate files.

Anyone got a resolution to this? If I list the filename at the command line, enclosed by quotes, it's OK - but when I put $x in quotes in my for loop, it doesn't work.

Thanks for any help!

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Free Palestine

put $x in quotes -

jim's solution will not work. The problem is "for x in `cat listoffiles`" will spilt the contents of listoffiles on whitespace. So with the example given, x will be "the" then it will be "file". And so on. Placing $x in quotes isn't enough because it's too late...the filename was split before x got a value.

My solution would be:

Nice one Perderabo, it works perfectly.

That is why I have always maintained you are the UNIX king.

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Free Palestine

one more solution on the same line is

while read line
do
echo "$line"
done < file_name;

This will work.



Ramesh

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Ramesh