Question

I want to loop through a path list that I have gotten from an echo $VARIABLE command.

For example:

echo $MANPATH will return

/usr/lib:/usr/sfw/lib:/usr/info

So that is three different paths, each separated by a colon. I want to loop though each of those paths. Is there a way to do that? Thanks.

Thanks for all the replies so far, it looks like I actually don’t need a loop after all. I just need a way to take out the colon so I can run one ls command on those three paths.

Answer 1

You can use Bash’s pattern substitution parameter expansion to populate your loop variable. For example:

MANPATH=/usr/lib:/usr/sfw/lib:/usr/info

# Replace colons with spaces to create list.
for path in ${MANPATH//:/ }; do
    echo "$path"
done

Note: Don’t enclose the substitution expansion in quotes. You want the expanded values from MANPATH to be interpreted by the for-loop as separate words, rather than as a single string.