I did this script
#!/bin/bash
liste=`ls -l`
for i in $liste
do
echo $i
done
The problem is I want the script displays each result line by line, but it displays word by word :
I have :
my_name
etud
4096
Oct
8
10:13
and I want to have :
my_name etud 4096 Oct 8 10:13
The final aim of the script is to analyze each line ; it is the reason I want to be able to recover the entire line. Maybe the list is not the best solution but I don't know how to recover the lines.
To start, we'll assume that none of your filenames ever contain newlines:
ls -l | IFS= while read -r line; do
echo "$line"
# Do whatever else you want with $line
done
If your filenames could contain newlines, things get tricky. In this case, it's better (although slower) to use stat to retrieve the desired metadata from each file individually. Consult man stat for details about how your local variety of stat works, as it is unfortunately not very standardized.
for f in *; do
line=$(stat -c "%U %n %s %y" "$f") # One possibility
# Work with $line as if it came from ls -l
done
stat allows may be more convenient. (But yeah, I simply overlooked that you could call ls for each file.)You can replace
echo $i
with
echo -n "$i "
echo -n outputs to console without newline.
echo -n is not POSIX standard. printf is the safe, portable approach.
Another to do it with a while loop and without a pipe:
#!/bin/bash
while read line
do
echo "line: $line"
done < <(ls -l)
read without -r -- thus having escape sequences interpreted -- and leaving $IFS at defaults -- and thus having trailing whitespace stripped), if the goal is to demonstrate reading from a stream. It's incorrect, if the goal is to demonstrate reading a list of files (some people really do think that ls is the right way to do this!). It would be good for an answer to be more clear.First, I hope that you aren't genuinely using ls in your real code, but only using it as an example. If you want a list of files, ls is the wrong tool; see http://mywiki.wooledge.org/ParsingLs for details.
Second, modern versions of bash have a builtin called readarray.
Try this:
readarray -t my_array < <(ls -l)
for entry in "${my_array[@]}"; do
read -a pieces <<<"$entry"
printf '<%s> ' "${pieces[@]}"; echo
done
First, it creates an array (called my_array) with all the output from the command being run.
Then, for each line in that output, it creates an array called pieces, and emits each piece with arrow brackets around them.
If you want to read a line at a time, rather than reading the entire file at once, see http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashFAQ/001 ("How can I read a file (data stream, variable) line-by-line (and/or field-by-field)?")
<(ls -l) will fail under the same circumstances as ls -l | while read....ls-specific, I don't believe I ever implied anything to the contrary -- see the first paragraph of my answer. (That said, unless you don't consider losing any process-local state relating to the content you've read "failing", I can't agree with the accuracy of the objection in the general, non-ls-specific case)Joinning the previous answers with the need to store the list of files in a variable. You can do this
echo -n "$list"|while read -r lin do echo $lin done
ls.