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[ # ] Bash Loop Over Folder Contents
October 3rd, 2009 under Linux

I was writing a bash script which has to loop over several folder recently. The command

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for i in $( ls ); do ... 
for i in $( ls ); do ...

does that. However, if the folder or file names contain whitespaces then this wont work because the

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for
for
loop splits the input at whitespaces. the reason for this is because
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for
for
loop uses whatever is in the $IFS environment variable and uses that as the splitter characters. By default it is set to the space character. Thus we have to change this temporarily to a line break.

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SAVEIFS=$IFS<br />
IFS=$(echo -en "\n\b")<br />
....<br />
IFS=$SAVEIFS
SAVEIFS=$IFS<br />
IFS=$(echo -en "\n\b")<br />
....<br />
IFS=$SAVEIFS

For more details see here.