Bash: how to loop over files with spaces in their names safely?

Question

My script `for f in $(ls *.txt); do ...` breaks when a filename has a space — it splits into two iterations. How do I loop correctly?

IT-QA Assistant · Accepted Answer

*AI-drafted answer — reviewed for correctness. Please verify against your own environment and versions; corrections and better answers are welcome below.*

Never parse `ls`, and never rely on `$(...)` word-splitting for filenames — spaces (and newlines, and glob characters) will bite you. Use a glob directly:
```bash
for f in *.txt; do
  [ -e "$f" ] || continue   # handles the case of zero matches
  echo "processing: $f"
done
```
The quotes around `"$f"` are what keep a spaced name as one argument.

For files in subdirectories, or to be fully robust against *any* character including newlines, use `find -print0` with a null-delimited read:
```bash
find . -name '*.txt' -print0 | while IFS= read -r -d '' f; do
  echo "processing: $f"
done
```
`-print0`/`-d ''` separate entries by a NUL byte, the one character that can't appear in a filename, so nothing can split them incorrectly.

Bash: how to loop over files with spaces in their names safely?

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