Re: [Help-bash] Array Expansion

[Greg Wooledge]

On Sun, Jun 25, 2017 at 12:25:32PM -0700, J.B. wrote:
> Expanding an array for use in a for-loop behaves differently depending on
> how the array was created.

No, it doesn't.  You are simply not creating the array correctly.

There are only two ways to iterate over an array in bash: by value, or
by index.

By value:  for f in "address@hidden"

By index:  for i in "address@hidden"

> $ listoffiles=($(find ./path/ -type f -exec ls
> --quoting-style=shell-escape-always '{}' \;))

This is wrong.  You are word-splitting the output of $(find) which is
never correct.


On Sun, Jun 25, 2017 at 10:17:57PM +0200, João Eiras wrote:
> This is most likely what you want:
> 
> IFS=$'\x0a'
> listoffiles=( $(find ...) )

No, this also fails when filenames contain newlines.

Anything that relies on word-splitting is fragile.


There are a few correct ways to read output from find into a bash array.
Here are some of them:

mapfile -t -d '' files < <(find ... -print0)     # requires bash 4.4

files=(); while IFS= read -r -d '' f; do
  files+=("$f")
done < <(find ... -print0)

files=() i=0; while IFS= read -r -d '' f; do
  files[i++]="$f"
done < <(find ... -print0)