How do I assign ls to an array in Linux Bash

Question

array   ls -d     echo   array         I have three directories  ww ee qq  I want them in an array and then print the array

User · Answer

This would print the files in those directories line by line   array  ww   ee   qq    printf   s n     array

User · Answer

It would be this  array    ls -d        EDIT  See Gordon Davisson s solution for a more general answer  i e  if your filenames contain special characters   This answer is merely a syntax correction

User · Answer

Whenever possible  you should avoid parsing the output of ls  see Greg s wiki on the subject   Basically  the output of ls will be ambiguous if there are funny characters in any of the filenames  It s also usually a waste of time  In this case  when you execute ls -d     what happens is that the shell expands    to a list of subdirectories  which is already exactly what you want   passes that list as arguments to ls -d  which looks at each one  says  yep  that s a directory all right  and prints it  in an inconsistent and sometimes ambiguous format   The ls command isn t doing anything useful   Well  ok  it is doing one thing that s useful  if there are no subdirectories     will get left as is  ls will look for a subdirectory named      not find it  print an error message that it doesn t exist  to stderr   and not print the       to stdout    The cleaner way to make an array of subdirectory names is to use the glob      without passing it to ls  But in order to avoid putting      in the array if there are no actual subdirectories  you should set nullglob first  again  see Greg s wiki    shopt -s nullglob array      shopt -u nullglob   Turn off nullglob to make sure it doesn t interfere with anything later echo    array         Note double-quotes to avoid extra parsing of funny characters in filenames   If you want to print an error message if there are no subdirectories  you re better off doing it yourself   if       array        0     then     echo  No subdirectories found   gt  amp 2 fi

[arrays] How do I assign ls to an array in Linux Bash?

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