How to preserve spaces in Bash "for loop" expression

Question

I have function that print lines with spaces and need to loop through the line with a for..in loop. How do I preserve the spaces and not tokenize based on them.

function getTwoThings
{
    echo "A B C"
    echo "X Y Z"
}

for L in `getTwoThings`
do
    echo $L
done

for L in "`getTwoThings`"
do
    echo $L
done

Produces either six things or one thing.

A
B
C
X
Y
Z

A B C X Y Z

How do I get it to produce two things?

Bash FAQ 001

chepner
– chepner

2016-02-01 22:12:15 +00:00
Commented Feb 1, 2016 at 22:12 — chepner
– chepner, Commented Feb 1, 2016 at 22:12

anubhava · Accepted Answer · 2016-02-01 22:08:00Z

2

Read it like this using process substitution:

while IFS= read -r line; do
   echo "$line"
done < <(getTwoThings)

Output:

A B C
X Y Z

answered Feb 1, 2016 at 22:08

anubhava

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1 Comment

swdev Over a year ago

Awesome, prefect answer.

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