bash script read all the files in directory

Question

How do I loop through a directory? I know there is for f in /var/files;do echo $f;done; The problem with that is it will spit out all the files inside the directory

Answer 1

To write it with a while loop you can do:

ls -f /var | while read -r file; do cmd $file; done

The primary disadvantage of this is that cmd is run in a subshell, which causes some difficulty if you are trying to set variables. The main advantages are that the shell does not need to load all of the filenames into memory, and there is no globbing. When you have a lot of files in the directory, those advantages are important (that's why I use -f on ls; in a large directory ls itself can take several tens of seconds to run and -f speeds that up appreciably. In such cases 'for file in /var/*' will likely fail with a glob error.)