[ILUG] Spaces in arguments in a bash for loop

[Niall O Broin]

While looking into my Dingbats fonts problem (q.v.) I encountered another
problem about which I've often meant to ask. An example may be best

niall at bagend:/tmp >grep ding fonts|grep -v TT
-ttf-webdings-medium-r-normal-regular-0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-1
-ttf-wingdings-medium-r-normal-regular-0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-1
-ttf-zapfdingbats bt-medium-r-normal-regular-0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-1


niall at bagend:/tmp >for dingfont in `grep ding fonts|grep -v TT`
> do echo $dingfont
> done
-ttf-webdings-medium-r-normal-regular-0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-1
-ttf-wingdings-medium-r-normal-regular-0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-1
-ttf-zapfdingbats
bt-medium-r-normal-regular-0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-1


As you can see, in the second command, where I used the first command's
output in a substitution, I get four lines of output, although I
only expect three. I know WHY this is happening (the space in the third
output line is being seen as a separator, hence dingfont gets four different
values rather than three) but I'd like to know how to stop it happening. I
regularly have to deal with files with embedded spaces in their names, and
some of what I need to do would be done nicely in a for loop as above, but
the embedded spaces screw things up for me. Is there a neat way of solving
this problem ? I say neat because one way which occurs to me is this

niall at bagend:/tmp >for x in `grep ding fonts|grep -v TT|sed -e 's/ /*/g'`; do
echo `echo $x|sed -e 's/*/ /g'`; done
-ttf-webdings-medium-r-normal-regular-0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-1
-ttf-wingdings-medium-r-normal-regular-0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-1
-ttf-zapfdingbats bt-medium-r-normal-regular-0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-1

but that sucks large hairy rocks (though I must say that I only just thought
of it, and I'll use it in future unless one of you geniuses can come up with
the 'right' answer)

The bash man page is rather unhelpful. It says

Bash performs the expansion by executing command and replacing the command
substitution with the standard output of the command, with any trailing
newlines deleted. Embedded newlines are not deleted, but they may be removed
during word splitting.

As I see it, embedded newlines ARE deleted. Perhaps they are "removed during
word splitting" but what does that mean exactly ? When I do 

echo `grep ding fonts|grep -v TT` > xx

I can't see that I'm doing any word splitting, and yet the resultant file xx
only has one line.

BTW the result's the same whether I use ` substitution or the new $() style.



Regards,


Niall