Question

As far as I know, find . -maxdepth 1 -type f is the only reliable way to get the list of files in a folder. However, naively putting the output of this command in a bash array (($(find . -maxdepth 1 -type f)) is going to fail if some files have spaces in their names.

What is the correct way to do this?

Answer 1

The safest way is to use find with -print0 which will also handle filenames with newlines in them correctly. Loop over the files and store them in an array:

declare -a arr=()
while IFS= read -r -d $'\0' f
do
    arr+=("$f")
done < <(find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -print0)

Test:

for i in "${arr[@]}"
do
    echo "[$i]"
done