Anchor(faq20)

How can I find and deal with file names containing newlines, spaces or both?

The preferred method is still to use [:UsingFind:find(1)]:

    find ... -exec command {} \;

or, if you need to handle filenames en masse, with GNU and recent BSD tools:

    find ... -print0 | xargs -0 command

or with POSIX find:

    find ... -exec command {} +

Use that unless you really can't.

Another way to deal with files with spaces in their names is to use the shell's filename expansion (["globbing"]). This has the disadvantage of not working recursively (except with zsh's extensions), but if you just need to process all the files in a single directory, it works fantastically well.

This example changes all the *.mp3 files in the current directory to use underscores in their names instead of spaces. It uses [#faq73 Parameter Expansions] that will not work in the original BourneShell, but should be good in Korn and Bash.

for file in *.mp3; do
    mv "$file" "${file// /_}"
done

You could do the same thing for all files (regardless of extension) by using

for file in *\ *; do

instead of *.mp3.

Another way to handle filenames recursively involes using the -print0 option of find (a GNU/BSD extension), together with bash's -d option for read:

unset a i
while read -d $'\0' file; do
  a[i++]="$file"        # or however you want to process each file
done < <(find /tmp -type f -print0)

The preceding example reads all the files under /tmp (recursively) into an array, even if they have newlines or other whitespace in their names, by forcing read to use the NUL byte (\0) as its word delimiter. Since NUL is not a valid byte in Unix filenames, this is the safest approach besides using find -exec.