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If you're writing a shell script that's going to use filenames that have spaces in them, and you need to iterate through them, you may find that bash splits the files in the wrong place. For example, if I have a file called "A file with spaces", bash may try to treat that as 4 files.
So, here's the trick... use the -Q option to ls. It automatically quotes your filenames for you.
Code:
#!/bin/bash
for file in `ls -Q`
do echo $file
done
microsoft/linux: no, it's cool, it was very much related, but it just addresses two separate needs. I just discovered the -Q and --quote-style options to ls and thought it was worth sharing, with all the troubles I've seen on here with filename splitting.
I put quotes around the echo()ed argument to preserve the whitespace in the filenames. Try the two variations with more than a single space (or tabs) between the words in the filename and see the difference.
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