UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I'm sure this is a simple thing but I can't figure it out. In a script that I'm writing, I'd like to be able to store each line of output from "ls -l" into a variable. Ultimately I'd like to end up with something like:

Code:

for a in `ls -l`
do something with $a
done

But that's reading each individual word from the entire output instead of each line. I can go into much more detail about what I'm trying to accomplish if I need to, but that's the basics of it. Thanks in advance for any help you can provide!

Try this way:

Code:

ls -l | while read line
do
   echo $line
done

Works like a charm! Thanks for your help.