How to use foreach on filenames with spaces?

BrianK · 08-08-2005, 10:27 PM

say I have some file names with spaces, like so:

$ ls
New Text Document (2).txt New Text Document.txt

(there are two files there)

and I want to loop over them and do something to them in a foreach loop, like so:

$ foreach f ( `find . -name \* -print0` )
foreach? echo $f
foreach? end
./New
Text
Document.txt
./New
Text
Document
(2).txt

obviously, that's not the output I want, I need to get the actual file name as opposed to their bits so I can do something to the file. Is there a way to do this? I'm using tcsh

Thanks

Matir · 08-08-2005, 11:02 PM

Have you considered:

Code:

find . -print0 | xargs -0 THECOMMANDTOEXEC

? It might not work for your specific case, but it works a lot of the time.

javeree · 08-09-2005, 04:24 AM

just before issuing the command set IFS='\t\n'
after the command re-set it to ' \t\n' (a space as first character)
this results in bash not recognizing spaces as word separators. It remains a problem if the command you execute relies on that.

Matir · 08-09-2005, 12:15 PM

You can't set IFS to ' \t\n'. For some silly reason, it doesn't expand escaped characters in it, you must set them as literals. So do "IFS='<space><tab><newline>'"