How do I deal with directories that have spaces in their names from `find`? [duplicate]

Question

I have this:

#!/bin/bash

for file in `find . -type d`
do
  echo $file
done

If I have just one directory called My Directory, the output is

My
Directory

How do I fix this?

The echo $file is just temporary. There will be other code in there operating on the directories.

Answer 1

Something like the following works ...

find . -type d | while read dir; do echo $dir; done
.
./my dir

Depending on what you're doing, you might be better using find's -print0 option and xargs -0.

The code you've got takes the unquoted output from find and uses it as a list of words (split on whitespace) for for to iterate over.

Answer 2

Do not use for loop, use while instead:

find . -type d -print0 | while read -d '' -r dir; do echo "$dir"; done

Option print0 prints NULL character at the end of file/directory name (instead of newline) and read -d '' interprets it properly.

Answer 3

You can just use "$file" in your example.

Answer 4

If you're really just looking to echo the results of find, you can use the parameter -print (or just no additional parameter at all) to have find print a list of its results.

If you want to delete the results, there's -delete (which can be combined with -print to get a list of the deleted files).

If you want to do something else with/to the results, you can use the parameter -exec to pass the results as parameters to another command, e.g.

• find . -type d -exec tar cf {}.tar {} \; to compress all directories into individual tarballs (one tar per directory, since \; makes find run the -exec command with one result at a time)
• find . -type d -exec tar cf all-directories.tar {} + to compress all directories into a single tarball (+ makes find run the -exec command with as many results as possible at a time)

Answer 5

Before answering your answer, I highly recommend you reading two question:

• Why does my shell script choke on whitespace or other special characters?
• Security implications of forgetting to quote a variable in bash/POSIX shells

For your question, you don't need a for loop, just find itself:

find -type d

If you want to do more things, just use -exec option (or -execdir if your find support):

find -type d -exec ... +

Answer 6

You have to set IFS variable in bash:

SAVEIFS=IFS
IFS=$(echo -en "\n\b")
...
YOURCODE
....
IFS=$SAVEIFS

But what does above code do? , it discard any space and meta char..