read the contents of a directory using shell script

Question

Hi,

I'm trying to get the contents of a directory using shell script.

My script is:

for entry in `ls`; do
    echo $entry
done

However, my current directory contains many files with whitespaces in their names. In that case, this script fails.

What is the correct way to loop over the contents of a directory in shell scripting?

PS: I use bash.

Answer 1

for entry in *
do
  echo "$entry"
done

Answer 2

don't parse directory contents using ls in a for loop. you will encounter white space problems. use shell expansion instead

   for file in *
    do
      if [ -f "$file" ];then
       echo "$file"
      fi
    done