Iterating over each line of ls -l output

Set IFS to newline, like this:

IFS='
'
for x in `ls -l $1`; do echo $x; done

Put a sub-shell around it if you don't want to set IFS permanently:

(IFS='
'
for x in `ls -l $1`; do echo $x; done)

Or use while | read instead:

ls -l $1 | while read x; do echo $x; done

One more option, which runs the while/read at the same shell level:

while read x; do echo $x; done << EOF
$(ls -l $1)
EOF

As already mentioned, awk is the right tool for this. If you don't want to use awk, instead of parsing output of "ls -l" line by line, you could iterate over all files and do an "ls -l" for each individual file like this:

for x in * ; do echo `ls -ld $x` ; done

It depends what you want to do with each line. awk is a useful utility for this type of processing. Example:

 ls -l | awk '{print $9, $5}'

.. on my system prints the name and size of each item in the directory.