👀 Views: 249 💬 Answers: 1 📅 Created: 2025-07-31

bash subshell scripting

I'm learning this framework and I'm following best practices but I've hit a wall trying to I'm optimizing some code but This might be a silly question, but I’m working with an scenario with capturing the output of a subshell in a variable using Bash. I have a script where I want to get the list of files in a directory and then process each file. I’m using the following code to achieve this: ```bash files=$(ls /path/to/directory | grep '.txt') for file in $files; do echo "Processing $file" done ``` However, when I run the script, it doesn't seem to capture any files, and I receive an empty output. I’ve verified that there are indeed `.txt` files in the specified directory. I also tried running the command directly in the terminal, and it gives me the expected output. I suspect it might have something to do with word splitting in Bash since the `for` loop doesn’t iterate properly over the filenames. When I echo the variable `files`, it outputs nothing, but if I do `echo "$files"`, I can see the content. I’ve also tried using `mapfile` to capture the output: ```bash mapfile -t files < <(ls /path/to/directory | grep '.txt') for file in "${files[@]}"; do echo "Processing $file" done ``` This gives me a list of files as expected, but I still find it confusing why the first method fails. Could it be related to the way Bash handles subshells or output redirection? Are there best practices I should be following when capturing output from subshells? I’m using Bash version 5.1.4, and I’m running this script on a Linux server. Any insights or suggestions would be greatly appreciated! For context: I'm using Bash on Windows. My development environment is Linux. Any help would be greatly appreciated! I'm working in a Windows 10 environment. What's the best practice here? This is happening in both development and production on Windows 10. What am I doing wrong? My development environment is Ubuntu 20.04. What's the correct way to implement this? I'm developing on macOS with Bash. Is this even possible? This is for a web app running on Ubuntu 22.04. Thanks for taking the time to read this!