Bash - Recursively looping through all subdirectories that contain spaces and dots

Question

I want to use something like find to recursively find all subdirectories and I need to do so in a for loop - the tasks are too complicated and long for & 's.

The above part is easy, but I also need it to include spaces and dots (prefixed) in the directory names - which so far I failed with every single solution I found on this SE. The names always either get split, or find just spits out a single string ( for loop happens only once).

Answer 1

For a pure Bash for -loop, use this:

shopt -s nullglob globstar dotglob

for subdir in **/; do
    do_stuff_with "$subdir" # quote the expansion "$subdir"
done

• To have a recursive glob, we use **/ with the shell option globstar .
• The dotglob option asks the shell to also glob on “hidden” files (the ones that have a leading period).
• The nullglob is to have the glob expand to nothing when there are no matches. (It's always a good idea to use it when looping on globs; otherwise failglob is a good choice when using a glob as argument to a command).

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With GNU find you can also do it as follows (don't forget to use -print0 and use read 's delimiter option -d '' , and also -r , and an empty IFS ):

while IFS= read -r -d '' subdir; do
    do_stuff_with "$subdir" # quote the expansion "$subdir"
done < <(find . \! -name . -type d -print0)

The \\! -name . \\! -name . predicate is to exclude the parent ./ directory.

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Both methods are safe with respect to any funny symbols you will have in filenames provided you quote the expansion "$subdir" !

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But I guess that the main problem you encountered with spaces is that you didn't quote your variable expansions!

Don't forget to quote every single expansion "$subdir" .

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Did I say that you should quote every single variable expansion?