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advanced patterns when using variable expansion in a Bash loop with `find` command

👀 Views: 615 💬 Answers: 1 📅 Created: 2025-08-07
bash find xargs variables file-processing Bash

I'm working on a personal project and Quick question that's been bugging me - I've tried everything I can think of but I'm testing a new approach and I'm sure I'm missing something obvious here, but I'm sure I'm missing something obvious here, but I'm experiencing an scenario with variable expansion while using the `find` command in a loop within my Bash script....... The script is intended to search for files in a specific directory and process each one, but it seems to unexpected result when the path contains spaces. Here's the relevant snippet of my script: ```bash #!/bin/bash search_dir="/path/to/my directory" find "$search_dir" -type f | while read -r file; do echo "Processing file: $file" # Additional processing... done ``` When I run the script, I get outputs like this: ``` Processing file: /path/to/my Processing file: directory/file1.txt ``` It looks like the file names are being split at spaces, causing the processing to unexpected result on subsequent commands. I tried using `find` with the `-print0` option and `xargs -0`, but then I encounter an scenario where the additional processing command doesn’t seem to handle the file names correctly either. Here’s what I tried: ```bash find "$search_dir" -type f -print0 | xargs -0 -I {} sh -c 'echo "Processing file: {}"; # Additional processing...' ``` However, this resulted in an behavior where `xargs` doesn’t seem to execute the commands properly if there are nested quotes in the file names. I am using Bash version 5.1 on Ubuntu 20.04. What can I do to ensure that my script correctly handles file names with spaces throughout the loop? This is part of a larger service I'm building. I'd really appreciate any guidance on this. I'm on Ubuntu 20.04 using the latest version of Bash. I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. Any ideas how to fix this? I'm developing on Windows 11 with Bash. Is there a better approach? The project is a microservice built with Bash. I'd really appreciate any guidance on this. I'm coming from a different tech stack and learning Bash. Is this even possible?