How to handle spaces in filenames using double quotes in a Bash script

Question

We have a script running on our Debian server that grabs filenames in a directory and pushes them to our API. It runs fine when filenames don't have spaces. The usual answer to this common issue is to use double quotes around the variable name.

However, I can't find a tidy, brief and definitive solution for our particular case—code below. Although this answer has suggests changing the separator from space to \n, I'd rather get the double quote method right in our existing code.

Here's the relevant part of the code:

files=("$(ls $directory)") #$directory has the files we want to loop through if [ ${#files[@]} -gt 0 ]; then getToken for i in $files do echo "$i" uploadFiles "$i" done exit else echo "No files to upload" exit fi

Simple: Don't parse ls.

gniourf_gniourf
– gniourf_gniourf

2015-09-24 18:00:30 +00:00
Commented Sep 24, 2015 at 18:00 — gniourf_gniourf
– gniourf_gniourf, Commented Sep 24, 2015 at 18:00

user000001 · Accepted Answer · 2015-09-24 18:03:23Z

To handle files with whitespace in them, write your script as bellow:

shopt -s nullglob files=("$directory"/*) for i in "${files[@]}" do echo "$i" uploadFiles "$i" done

Or if you don't need to keep the array, you can do

shopt -s nullglob for i in "$directory"/* do echo "$i" uploadFiles "$i" done

thanks - we only use the array once each time the script runs. It's running on a project critical cron job ATM so I'll try this as soon as we're able to stop/restart it and accept if all goes well.

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