Iterate over space delimited string in a shell script-CodePudding

The following shell snippet should iterate over the given space delimited string:

files="one two three"; for f in "$files"; do; echo "◌ $f"; done

Expecting:

◌ one
◌ two
◌ three

Getting:

◌ one two three

If the value for $files would have been hardcoded, it works with files=(one two three), however, the files="one two three" command ends up with `files="one two three".

How can I fix this loop to properly iterate over the string?

CodePudding user response：

Why not use ls -1a and awk?

For example:

ls -1a | awk '{ print "◌ " $0 }'

That should give you the list of file in the cwd in the following format:

◌ one
◌ three
◌ two

Or, as suggested in the comment, just use the for loop.

for f in *; do echo "◌ $f"; done

CodePudding user response：

I went with the following solution:

files="one two three"
array=(`echo $files`)
for f in $array; do
  echo "◌ $f"
done

where $files can be the output of for example ls or some arbitrary command that gives you back a space delimited string.

Essentially then I could also do the following:

files=(`echo $(ls)`)
for f in $files; do
  echo "◌ $f"
done