In linux shell scripting I am trying to set the output of find into an array as below
#!/bin/bash arr=($(find . -type -f))
but it give error as -type should contain only one character. can anybody tell me where is the issue.
Thanks
2 Answers
If you are using bash 4, the readarray command can be used along with process substitution.
readarray -t arr < <(find . -type f)
Properly supporting all file names, including those that contain newlines, requires a bit more work, along with a version of find that supports -print0:
while read -d '' -r; do
arr+=( "$REPLY" )
done < <(find . -type f -print0)
Comments
I suggest the following script:
#!/bin/bash
listoffiles=$(find . -type f)
nfiles=$(echo "${listoffiles}" | wc -l)
unset myarray
for i in $(seq 1 ${nfiles}) ; do
myarray[$((i-1))]=$(echo "${listoffiles}" | sed -n $i'{p;q}')
done
Because you cannot rely on the Bash automatic array instanciation through the myarr=( one two three ) syntax, because it treats the same way all whitespaces (including spaces) it sees within its parentheses. So you have to handle the resulting multiline variable listoffiles kindof manually, what I do in the above script.
echo without the -n option prints a trailing newline at the very end of the variable, but that's fine in our case because find doesn't (you may check this with echo -n "${listoffiles}").
And I use sed to extract the relevant i^th line, with the $i being interpreted by the shell before being given to sed as the first character of its own script.
1 Comment
Aserre
Bash doesn't treat spaces the same way at all. It just uses the global variable Internal Field Separator ($IFS) to determine which characters are used to separate fields. By default, its value is "spac tab newline" (
$' \t\n') but it can be remapped to any value you want. If you change its value to only $'\n', bash will process the output of find line by line and will not count spaces as different fields
arr=($(find . -type f))IFS=$'\n' arr=($(find . -type f)).echo "${arr[X]}"will display the Xth member of the array correctly even if there are spaces in the name