Hi,

I have a for loop which iterates over a list of strings, separated by whitespace:

$ list="1 2 3"
$ for i in $list; do echo $i; done
1
2
3

$ for i in 1\ 2 3; do echo $i; done
1 2
3

$ list="1\ 2 3"
$ for i in $list; do echo $i; done
1\
2
3

You could try using set, e.g...

$ set "1 2" "3"
$ for i; do echo $i; done
1 2
3

$ set 1\ 2 3
$ for i; do echo $i; done
1 2
3

hey there,

Setting

IFS=\n

at your bash prompt will set the delimiter a for loop uses to a newline.
eg with default IFS:
$ cat filelist
1 2 3
a b c


$ for i in `cat filelist` ; do echo $i ; done
1
2
3
a
b
c

$ IFS=\n
$ for i in `cat filelist` ; do echo $i ; done
1 2 3
a b c


Not super relevant to the first post as you can't choose the spot of the delimiter. but may help anyone stumbling along this post looking for an answer on how to change the delimiter a for loop is using.

In bash, I think this should be:
IFS=$’\n’

Also, you may want to store the old value of the environment variable IFS as overwriting it can potentially cause conflicts with other processes that use it.

-FJB

Thank you for this suggestion. It was very helpful for me.