Question

I am looping though a directory for a certain command; however, I do not know how to accommodate for spaces

#!/bin/bash

image=(`ls *.bmp *.jpeg *.jpg | sort`)
data=(`ls *.dat | sort`)

for ((i=0; i < ${#image[@]}; i++))
do
  echo ${image[$i]} ${data[$i]}
done

I ran this script and it returned

OIS032_OS.bmp Disc
OIS034_OS.bmp Cube
OIS035_OD.bmp 200x200_9-30-2010_OD
OIS035_OS.bmp _ILM_RNFLOb.dat
OIS036_OD.bmp OIS007_Optic
OIS036_OS.bmp Disc

I wanted the program to return this line

OIS016_OD.bmp  OIS016_Optic Disc Cube 200x200_OS _ILM_RNFLOb.dat 

How do I fix bash array to store what I need

data=(`ls *.dat | sort`) 

Answer 1

Don’t call ls; just use pattern matching to populate the array:

shopt -s extglob    # We'll use a more complicated glob to avoid needing to sort
image=( *.@(bmp|jpeg|jpg) )
data=( *.dat )

for ((i=0; i < ${#image[@]}; i++))
do
  echo ${image[$i]} ${data[$i]}
done