How to perform a for-each loop over all the files under a specified path?
The for
-loop will iterate over each (space separated) entry on the provided string.
You do not actually execute the find
command, but provide it is as string (which gets iterated by the for
-loop).
Instead of the double quotes use either backticks or $()
:
for line in $(find . -iname '*.txt'); do
echo "$line"
ls -l "$line"
done
Furthermore, if your file paths/names contains spaces this method fails (since the for
-loop iterates over space separated entries). Instead it is better to use the method described in dogbanes answer.
To clarify your error:
As said, for line in "find . -iname '*.txt'";
iterates over all space separated entries, which are:
- find
- .
- -iname
- '*.txt' (I think...)
The first two do not result in an error (besides the undesired behavior), but the third is problematic as it executes:
ls -l -iname
A lot of (bash) commands can combine single character options, so -iname
is the same as -i -n -a -m -e
. And voila: your invalid option -- 'e'
error!
Here is a better way to loop over files as it handles spaces and newlines in file names:
#!/bin/bash
find . -type f -iname "*.txt" -print0 | while IFS= read -r -d $'\0' line; do
echo "$line"
ls -l "$line"
done
Use command substitution instead of quotes to execute find instead of passing the command as a string:
for line in $(find . -iname '*.txt'); do
echo $line
ls -l $line;
done
More compact version working with spaces and newlines in the file name:
find . -iname '*.txt' -exec sh -c 'echo "{}" ; ls -l "{}"' \;