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I am a newbie in Unix. I have a requirement in which I have to put the output of find statement in array because later in the script I have to use the output lines one by one. My find statement will retrieve me the location of directories based on the condition.
Here are the find statements:
find blah -mindepth 3 -maxdepth 3 -type d -regex ".*/V[0-9]+/wsdls+"
You can do this:
array=( $(find blah -mindepth 3 -maxdepth 3 -type d -regex ".*/V[0-9]+/wsdls+") )
# loop over it
for i in ${array[@]}
do
echo $i
done
# or in a while loop
i=0;
while [ $i -lt ${#array[@]} ]
do
echo $i: ${array[$i]}
((i++))
done
IFS=$'\n' first though: in case any of the filenames have spaces, you want to keep them as a single array element. The you'll also want to use double quotes when referencing the array: for i in "${array[@]}"
Apr 20, 2011 at 13:15
IFS=$'\n' needs to be at the start of the assignment statement, not in the find subshell; e.g. IFS=$'\n' array=(...).
This answer on stackoverflow has all the details and also some alternatives. But essentially, a reliable way to do it is:
array=()
while IFS= read -r -d $'\0'; do
array+=("$REPLY")
done < <(find Where What... -print0)
Using -print0 for the output of find and a null byte as delimiter for read avoids all the pitfalls created by filenames with spaces or worse.
And to iterate over the filenames in the array, use quotes around the array :
for file in "${array[@]}"; do
echo "$file"
done
