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Full Discussion: Handling filenames with spaces
Top Forums Shell Programming and Scripting Handling filenames with spaces Post 303023838 by Scrutinizer on Sunday 23rd of September 2018 10:19:57 PM
Old 09-23-2018
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ralph
Both versions worked fine. Why do you write IFS=$'\n' ? It worked for me without the $. But shouldn't now a newline be used to split the fields? (There's no newline in the variable.)
$'\n' is a way to denote a hard newline character. When this variable is set before the unquoted variable expansion of filesToShow, the variable is split into fields depending on the newline character.

After the assignment filesToShow=`ls -Q` there are certainly newlines present in the variable.

If you use IFS='\n' then the content of variable is field split on the n character or the backslash character. So if there happen to be no n-characters or \-characters then the variable will be split into a single field, that gets printed in a a single for loop iteration. What is then printed may look the same, but the process is entirely different..

To illustrate:
Code:
$ IFS='\n'; for file in $filesToShow ; do   echo "new line: $file"; done
new line: file 1
file 2
file 
new line: umber 1
file 
new line: umber 2
file 
new line: umber 3
$ IFS=$'\n'; for file in $filesToShow ; do   echo "new line: $file"; done
new line: file 1
new line: file 2
new line: file number 1
new line: file number 2
new line: file number 3


--
Note1: $'\n' only works in modern shells is also not a standard feature (like is the case with arrays). A portable alternative would be to assign like this:
Code:
IFS="
"

Note2: it is better to use filesToShow=$(ls -Q) instead of the outdated backticks method.
Last edited by Scrutinizer; 09-24-2018 at 01:36 PM..
 

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LEARN ABOUT DEBIAN

dh_installmanpages

DH_INSTALLMANPAGES(1)						     Debhelper						     DH_INSTALLMANPAGES(1)

NAME

       dh_installmanpages - old-style man page installer (deprecated)

SYNOPSIS

       dh_installmanpages [debhelperoptions] [file...]

DESCRIPTION

       dh_installmanpages is a debhelper program that is responsible for automatically installing man pages into usr/share/man/ in package build
       directories.

       This is a DWIM-style program, with an interface unlike the rest of debhelper. It is deprecated, and you are encouraged to use
       dh_installman(1) instead.

       dh_installmanpages scans the current directory and all subdirectories for filenames that look like man pages. (Note that only real files
       are looked at; symlinks are ignored.) It uses file(1) to verify that the files are in the correct format. Then, based on the files'
       extensions, it installs them into the correct man directory.

       All filenames specified as parameters will be skipped by dh_installmanpages.  This is useful if by default it installs some man pages that
       you do not want to be installed.

       After the man page installation step, dh_installmanpages will check to see if any of the man pages are .so links. If so, it changes them to
       symlinks.

OPTIONS

       file ...
	   Do not install these files as man pages, even if they look like valid man pages.

BUGS

       dh_installmanpages will install the man pages it finds into all packages you tell it to act on, since it can't tell what package the man
       pages belong in. This is almost never what you really want (use -p to work around this, or use the much better dh_installman(1) program
       instead).

       Files ending in .man will be ignored.

       Files specified as parameters that contain spaces in their filenames will not be processed properly.

SEE ALSO

       debhelper(7)

       This program is a part of debhelper.

AUTHOR

       Joey Hess <joeyh@debian.org>

9.20120909							    2011-09-12						     DH_INSTALLMANPAGES(1)
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