Iterating over each line of ls -l output

Question

I want to iterate over each line in the output of  ls -l  some dir    Right now I m trying  for x in   ls -l  1   do echo  x  done  However  this iterates over each element in the line separately  so I get   -r--r----- 1 ivanevf eng 1074 Apr 22 13 07 File1  -r--r----- 1 ivanevf eng 1074 Apr 22 13 17 File2   But I want to iterate over each line as a whole  though   How do I do that

User · Answer

It depends what you want to do with each line. awk is a useful utility for this type of processing. Example:

 ls -l | awk '{print $9, $5}'

.. on my system prints the name and size of each item in the directory.

User · Answer

So  why didn t anybody suggest just using options that eliminate the parts he doesn t want to process   On modern Debian you just get your file with   ls --format single-column    Further more  you don t have to pay attention to what directory you are running it in if you use the full directory   ls --format single-column  root dir starting point to target dir    This last command I am using the above and I get the following output   bot dev   downloaded Daily  ls --format single-column  home bot downloaded Daily   gz  home bot downloaded Daily Liq DailyManifest V3 US 20141119 IENT1 txt gz  home bot downloaded Daily Liq DailyManifest V3 US 20141120 IENT1 txt gz  home bot downloaded Daily Liq DailyManifest V3 US 20141121 IENT1 txt gz

User · Answer

As already mentioned  awk is the right tool for this  If you don t want to use awk  instead of parsing output of  ls -l  line by line  you could iterate over all files and do an  ls -l  for each individual file like this   for x in     do echo  ls -ld  x    done

User · Answer

You can also try the find command   If you only want files in the current directory      find   -d 1 -prune -ls   Run a command on each of them      find   -d 1 -prune -exec echo         Count lines  but only in files      find   -d 1 -prune -type f -exec wc -l

User · Answer

Set IFS to newline  like this   IFS     for x in  ls -l  1   do echo  x  done   Put a sub-shell around it if you don t want to set IFS permanently    IFS     for x in  ls -l  1   do echo  x  done    Or use while   read instead   ls -l  1   while read x  do echo  x  done   One more option  which runs the while read at the same shell level   while read x  do echo  x  done  lt  lt  EOF   ls -l  1  EOF

User · Answer

The read 1  utility along with output redirection of the ls 1  command will do what you want

[linux] Iterating over each line of ls -l output

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