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 seperately, 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

I want to iterate over each line as a whole, though.

How do I do that?

Thanks.

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

Never ever ever ever iterate over the output of ls. Get the list of files with a glob, then use stat to look at each file's properties.

Answer 3

#!/bin/bash

for x in "$(ls -l $1)"; do 
   echo "$x"
done

Answer 4

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

Answer 5

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

Answer 6

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

Answer 7

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 {} \;