Hacker News Reader

Comment by fuzztester | Hacker News Reader

[You don't even need the (ls) for file iteration:

  for i in *
    echo $i
  end

]

You don't even need the for for that (specific example):

echo *

at least in sh and bash.

View on HN

Also, IIRC, and less commonly seen, you can do:

  for i 
  do 
    # your commands using $i here
  done

which will iterate over all the command line arguments to the script containing that for loop. It is a shortcut for:

  for i in $*
    # note: not for i in *
  # the rest is the same above

This is mentioned in either the shell man page or in the Kernighan & Pike book The Unix Programming Environment.

echo * does not have the newline after each file

True, echo * will print all the filenames on one line, with a space between pairs, but for data processing purposes, the two snippets are equivalent, because as per shell behavior, newline, tab and space are all treated as space, unless quoted. Like the definition of whitespace in the K&R C book. After all, Unix is written in C.

You wouldn’t iterate over `echo *` anyway. This works just fine in bash/sh:

    for file in *; do
        echo "$file"
    done

Reply on news.ycombinator.com