How can I store the “find” command results as an array in Bash

Question

I am trying to save the result from find as arrays. Here is my code:

#!/bin/bash

echo \"input : \"
read input

echo \"searching file with this          


        

Answer 1

Bash 4.4 introduced a -d option to readarray/mapfile, so this can now be solved with

readarray -d '' array < <(find . -name "$input" -print0)

for a method that works with arbitrary filenames including blanks, newlines, and globbing characters. This requires that your find supports -print0, as for example GNU find does.

From the manual (omitting other options):

mapfile [-d delim] [array]

-d
The first character of delim is used to terminate each input line, rather than newline. If delim is the empty string, mapfile will terminate a line when it reads a NUL character.

And readarray is just a synonym of mapfile.

Answer 2

For me, this worked fine on cygwin:

declare -a names=$(echo "("; find <path> <other options> -printf '"%p" '; echo ")")
for nm in "${names[@]}"
do
    echo "$nm"
done

This works with spaces, but not with double quotes (") in the directory names (which aren't allowed in a Windows environment anyway).

Beware the space in the -printf option.