bash script space question

[dualblade]

i'm trying to read the contents of a directory into an array, but i'm not sure how to deal with subdirectories that have spaces.

the code i've got is like this:

for dir in `ls  /vmstorage/`
do
list[count]=$dir
echo "$count: $dir"
count=$((count+1))
done

if the subdirectory has a space, the text after the space will become a new array position. i know strings can handle having spaces, but i'm not sure how to do this correctly. any advice?

 

[alt_nick]

You need to set the word separator (which is any whitespace by default)

IFS=$'\n'
for dir in `ls  /vmstorage/`
do
list[count]=$dir
echo "$count: $dir"
count=$((count+1))
done

or use bash's built-in filename expansion

for dir in /vmstorage/*
do
list[count]=$dir
echo "$count: $dir"
count=$((count+1))
done

 

[dualblade]

thanks so much for the quick answer. i've only been working on scripting for half a day so there's so much i don't know