Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi All,

I need to read filenames with space in between in a for loop
like
Integration of utility projects
Integration of hdf projects

I copied these files from a windows system and as you know windows filename has spaces in between them.

But while unix is reading the filename in a for loop it reads word by word and in the end it's futile because all the filenames has space in between.

This is the command I use to read the filenames

for i in `ls -l`

Is there a way to accomplish this. Please help me on this.

try

Code:

ls -1 | while read filename
do
  echo "$filename" 
done

Thanks a lot.

It worked fine.

Can you please explain why is this not possible in a for loop instead of a while loop? What makes the difference.

Hi,

There is no reason that it doesn't work with for loop, try this:

Code:

for i in "`ls -1`"
do
echo "$i"
done

you could also set the internal-field-seperator to a newline, if you use bash

IFS="
"

check man bash /IFS

Notice that the solution is 'ls -1' (one, not "el"). That puts each file on it's own line. When you read it, you're assigning the whole line to a variable, not per whitespace-delimited word.

Infact you dont need an "ls -1" as such. A simple ls would do. In this case, the output of ls -1 and ls is the same. The output would be a file per line.