Question

I use the following Bash Shell script to list the “.txt” files recursively under the current directory :

#!/bin/bash
for file in $( find . -type f -name "*.txt" )
do
  echo $file
  # Do something else.
done

However, some of the “.txt” files under the current directory have spaces in their names, e.g. “my testing.txt”. The listing becomes corrupted, e.g. “my testing.txt” is listed as

my
testing.txt

It seems that the “for” loop uses “white space” (space, \n etc) to separate the file list but in my case I want to use only “\n” to separate the file list.

Is there any way I could modify this script to achieve this purpose. Any idea.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

If you’re using bash 4, just use a glob:

#!/bin/bash                                                                     

shopt -s globstar

for file in **/*.txt
do
  if [[ ! -f "$file" ]]
  then
      continue
  fi
  echo "$file"
  # Do something else.                                                          
done

Be sure to quote "$file" or you’ll have the same problem elsewhere. ** will recursively match files and directories if you have enabled globstar.