[ILUG] Re: script handling filenames with spaces

[Marcus Furlong]

On Saturday 18 August 2007 19:18 in <20070818181836.GA7347 at yerma.org>, Pete
McEvoy wrote:

> Hi.
> Could anyone advise on the below script:
> 
> #!/bin/sh -x
> 
> FOLDERS=/tmp/folders/
> MAILDIR=/tmp/maildir/
> 
> for i in `ls $FOLDERS`
> do
>  for j in "`find $FOLDERS$i/mail/ -type f`"
>   do
>    mb2md -s "$j" -d "$MAILDIR$i/.$(basename $j)"
>    done
>    done
>    
> The contents of /tmp/folders/$i/mail/ are mailboxes, which can have
> spaces and perhaps odd characters in the name, as such I need to ensure
> $j is quoted before being passed to mb2md.
> Niall on irc recommended the use of print0 and xargs -0 , but at this
> late stage of the day I'm unable to grok how I would work them into my
> script.
> 
> Any help would be appreciated.
> 
> Thanks
> 

Maybe try setting IFS to be just <newline> instead of <space>, <tab> and
<newline>? Add this to the start of your script.

IFS="
"

That should handle the spaces anyway, not sure how to best go about odd
characters.

Marcus.