View source for Dealing with spaces in filenames

BASH for loop works nicely under UNIX / Linux / Windows and OS X while working on set of files. However, if you try to process a for loop on file name with spaces in them you are going to have some problem. For loop uses $IFS variable to determine what the field separators are. By default $IFS is set to the space character. There are multiple solutions to this problem.

=Set $IFS variable=

Try it as follows:

<pre>
#!/bin/bash
SAVEIFS=$IFS
IFS=$(echo -en "\n\b")
for f in *
do
  echo "$f"
done
IFS=$SAVEIFS
</pre>
OR

<pre>
#!/bin/bash
SAVEIFS=$IFS
IFS=$(echo -en "\n\b")
# set me
FILES=/data/*
for f in $FILES
do
  echo "$f"
done
# restore $IFS
IFS=$SAVEIFS
</pre>

=More examples using $IFS and while loop=

Now you know that if the field delimiters are not whitespace, you can set IFS. For example, while loop can be used to get all fields from /etc/passwd file:

<pre>....
while IFS=: read userName passWord userID groupID geCos homeDir userShell
do
      echo "$userName -> $homeDir"
done < /etc/passwd
</pre>