👀 Views: 86 💬 Answers: 1 📅 Created: 2025-05-31

bash array loop Bash

I'm trying to figure out Could someone explain I've spent hours debugging this and I have a Bash script that is meant to loop through an array of file names... However, it seems to break when the file names contain spaces. The script works perfectly for files without spaces, but I’m running into issues when I try to process files like `my document.txt` or `file name with spaces.log`. Here's a simplified version of my code: ```bash #!/bin/bash files=("file1.txt" "my document.txt" "another file.log") for file in "${files[@]}"; do echo "Processing: $file" # some processing logic here done ``` When I run this script, I get the following output: ``` Processing: file1.txt Processing: my Processing: document.txt Processing: another Processing: file.log ``` It looks like the loop is splitting the elements of the array at spaces, which is not what I want. I've tried quoting the variable like `"${files[@]}"`, but that doesn't seem to help. I also checked that `IFS` is set to its default value which should be fine for this. I’m using Bash version 5.0 on Ubuntu 20.04. Any suggestions on how to make the loop work for file names with spaces? For context: I'm using Bash on Linux. This is part of a larger CLI tool I'm building. What's the best practice here? For reference, this is a production application. I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.