Bashscripts.org

I am working in the Terminal app on a Mac machine running OS X Tiger.
In trying to teach myself the basics, I copied the following loop out of a book:

It worked as expected. So I decided to play around with it in different ways and came across a recurring problem.

Many filenames on a Mac contain spaces. When I renamed the text files on my Desktop to include spaces, the results of the loop did not come back as expected:

The difficulty is the spaces in the filenames, "One NOTICE.txt" and "Two README.txt". I would appreciate if someone could show me how to rewrite the loop so it works with such filenames.

Thx in advance.

There are 2 issues with the example:
First the 'ls' command will execute and return a list of files, including their spaces to the for-loop. The for-loop will see each word in the list it receives as an entry for it's loop. So a file with a space in it will be seen as 2 'words'. I still don't know why people do an 'ls' inside a for-loop, because many, if not all shells have file-globbing.
The second issue is that even if the variable 'i' will contain a filename with a space in it, it is passed without quotes to your 'say' command. The same happens here as described before. you will call the 'say' command with 2 separate 'words'. Both don't exist, except as a whole. If you want to pass a variable as a whole, please put double quotes around it.
So my solution would be:

Thank you, Patsie

for both the explanation and the fix. It was just a throwaway example from a book I am working my way through but it sure bugged me to no end that I couldn't find a way to make it work. I am now... uh, relieved. With your help, I have a better understanding and a new tool in my belt going forward.

Thanks again for such a timely response,
noel44.

I have a similar question with rm -r

I tried

but it still passes seperate words and I get



It seems to work with cp -r, why not with rm -r??

Use file-globbing in your for-loop and not 'ls'.

Please explain file-globbin. What i would like to do is to remove a list of directories that are already present in another directory:

Should i do it like this?



The directories that have to be removed have whitespaces in their names

That should work!

The other thing you could try is changing the internal field separator (IFS) temporarily so it doesn't split on whitespace. Something like this:

Yes this should work just fine. You are using file globbing right there
If you want to know more about file globbing, I suggest you read the wikipedia page

Ok thanks guys this works! I deleted all the files in one directory based on the directories in another directory using this code



Thanks again

Will that work for files in which name includes spaces?