Hi, drewk:

Nope, it's not. Everything that I said in that post is 100% correct.

That does not fix any whitespace problems. If anything, that code is terribly broken and suffers from the shortcomings (unwanted word splitting breaking filenames into pieces) that I spoke of earlier.

Proof:

Code:

#Create two files in an empty directory, each of whose name contains a space
$ touch '1 2' '3 4'

#Your code that supposedly fixes the space problem
$ for i in `ls`; do ls -l "$i"; done
ls: 1: No such file or directory
ls: 2: No such file or directory
ls: 3: No such file or directory
ls: 4: No such file or directory

#The correct way to do that
$ for i in *; do ls -l "$i"; done
-rw-r--r--   1 xxxx  xxxx  0 Mar  4 12:16 1 2
-rw-r--r--   1 xxxx  xxxx  0 Mar  4 12:16 3 4

Regarding...
...the issues you present have absolutely nothing to do with injected carriage returns, but with the fact that the double quoted command substitution will ALWAYS evaluate to a single word regardless of how many files are in the directory. Those for loops are pointless and equivalent to:

Code:

echo "`ls | grep '^D'`"
wc -l "`ls | grep '^D'`"

If you can't see that and you still think I'm mistaken, perhaps the 'Useless Use of' links @ https://www.unix.com/shell-programmin...#post302400942 will help. If that still doesn't do it, read sh man page and/or posix sh documentation (particularly the sections on word splitting, quoting, and command substitution) and experiment until you see it.

Cheers,
Alister

P.S. By the way, since the tone of a message can easily be misinterpreted online, I just wanted to make it clear that I responded to your post in detail to help you understand and to ensure that no one else who has read this thread makes the same mistakes. It was not intended as an "i must win this Internet argument" type of response. I hope it helped.