bash: passing paths with spaces as parameters?

Question

I have a bash script that recieves a set of files from the user. These files are sometimes under directories with spaces in their names. Unfortunately unlike this question all t

Answer 1

You want "$@", which has the special syntax of expanding $@ but preserving the white-space quoting of the caller (it does not create a single giant string with all the arguments in it). So someone can call your script like:

bash-script.sh AFile "Another File With Spaces"

Then in your script you can do things like:

for f in "$@"; do 
  echo "$f"; 
done

and get two lines of output (not 5).

Read the paragraph about the Special Parameter "@" here: http://www.gnu.org/s/bash/manual/bash.html#Special-Parameters