how to output file names surrounded with quotes in SINGLE line?

Question

I would like to output the list of items in a folder in the folowing way:

\"filename1\"  \"filename2\" \"file name with spaces\" \"foldername\" \"folder name wit         


        

Answer 1

    find . | sed "s|.*|\"&\"|"

Brief description:
We take result of .* pattern and put it into quotes.
Good source is sed.

Detail description:
Pattern: s/one/ONE/

• s Substitute command.
• / Delimiter.
  In my expression "|" is used instead of "/" to prevent "mountains" like in pattern s/.*/\"&\"/.
• one Regular expression pattern search pattern.
• ONE Replacement string.
• .* Means any symbol that repeats unlimited number of times.
• \" Means " itself.
• & Special character that corresponds to the pattern found.

Answer 2

for f in *; do printf "'%s' " "$f"; done; echo

Or, thanks to Gordon Davisson:

printf "'%s' " *; echo

The trailing echo is simply to add a newline to the output.

Answer 3

You could also simply use find "-printf", as in :

find . -printf "\"%p\" " | xargs your_command

where:

%p = file-path

This will surround every found file-path with quotes and separate each item with a space. This avoids the use of multiple commands.

Answer 4

You can use the GNU ls option --quoting-style to easily get what you are after. From the manual page:

--quoting-style=WORD

use quoting style WORD for entry names: literal, locale, shell, shell-always, shell-escape, shell-escape-always, c, escape

For example, using the command ls --quoting-style=shell-escape-always, your output becomes:

'filename1' 'filename2' 'file name with spaces' 'foldername' 'folder name with spaces'

Using --quoting-style=c, you can reproduce your desired example exactly. However, if the output is going to be used by a shell script, you should use one of the forms that correctly escapes special characters, such as shell-escape-always.

Answer 5

try

ls | sed -e 's/^/"/g' -e 's/$/"/g' | tr '\n' ' '

Answer 6

To avoid hacks trying to manually add quotes, you can take advantage of printfs %q formatting option:

❯ ll .zshrc.d
total 112K
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root  378 Jul  1 04:39  options.zsh*
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root   57 Jul  1 04:39  history.zsh*
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root  301 Jul  1 05:01  zinit.zsh*
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root  79K Jul  1 05:19  p10k.zsh*
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root  345 Jul  1 05:24  zplugins.zsh*
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root  490 Jul  4 23:40  aliases.zsh*
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 9.0K Jul 27 08:14  lscolors.zsh
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root    0 Aug 30 05:56 'foo bar'
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root    0 Aug 30 05:58 '"foo"'

❯ find .zshrc.d -exec printf '%q ' {} +
.zshrc.d .zshrc.d/history.zsh .zshrc.d/aliases.zsh .zshrc.d/zplugins.zsh .zshrc.d/p10k.zsh .zshrc.d/zinit.zsh .zshrc.d/options.zsh '.zshrc.d/"foo"' '.zshrc.d/foo bar' .zshrc.d/lscolors.zsh #

vs:

find .zshrc.d -printf "\"%p\" "
".zshrc.d" ".zshrc.d/history.zsh" ".zshrc.d/aliases.zsh" ".zshrc.d/zplugins.zsh" ".zshrc.d/p10k.zsh" ".zshrc.d/zinit.zsh" ".zshrc.d/options.zsh" ".zshrc.d/"foo"" ".zshrc.d/foo bar" ".zshrc.d/lscolors.zsh" #

Notice the file .zshrc.d/"foo" is incorrectly escaped.

❯ echo ".zshrc.d/"foo""
.zshrc.d/foo

❯ echo '.zshrc.d/"foo"'
.zshrc.d/"foo"