Linux

11550 readers

671 users here now

A community for everything relating to the GNU/Linux operating system (except the memes!)

Also, check out:

Original icon base courtesy of lewing@isc.tamu.edu and The GIMP

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

Ategon@programming.dev

anzo@programming.dev

dwraf_of_ignorance@programming.dev

[GUIDANCE] "For" in Bash (programming.dev)

submitted 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) by emotional_soup_88@programming.dev to c/linux@programming.dev

15 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Edit: SOLVED. Thank you all for your incredible insights! All of you helped me improve my code and knowledge! Special thanks to @Quibblekrust@thelemmy.club who just NAILED it. :)

I'm playing around with Bash just to learn.

LIST=$(ls); for i in $LIST; do echo "I found one!"; done

The variable "i" could literally be anything, as long as it doesn't have a special meaning for Bash, in which case I'd have to escape it, right? Anyway, my real question is: how does do (or rather the whole for-expression) know that "i" here means "for every line/item that ls outputs"? The above one liner works great and writes "I found one!" the number of times corresponding to the number of lines or items that ls outputs. But I would like to understand why it worked...

I'm a complete beginner at both Bash and C, but I understand some basic concepts.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] rycee@lemmy.world 6 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

I'm pretty sure that IFS does not apply to quoted strings since word splitting happens before the quote removal (see Shell Expansion).

$ ( files=$(ls); IFS=$'\n' ; for x in $files; do echo $x; done )
file a.txt
file b.txt
plainfile.txt

$ ( files=$(ls); IFS=$'\n' ; for x in "$files"; do echo $x; done )
file a.txt file b.txt plainfile.txt

[–] harsh3466@lemmy.ml 2 points 3 weeks ago

I didn't realize that. Thanks for pointing that out!