space containing items in bash for-loop

Question

I want to recursively convert all markdown files under ./src/ to html:

#!/bin/bash

function do_recursive_pandoc {
local markdown_src_file_extension=\*.markdown
local markdown_src_path="$1"
local html_output_path="$2"
mkdir "$html_output_path" 2>/dev/null

for i in $(find $markdown_src_path -name $markdown_src_file_extension 2>/dev/null | cut --delimiter='/' --fields=2- )
do
    mkdir "$html_output_path"/$(dirname "$i") 2>/dev/null
    pandoc -rmarkdown -whtml "$markdown_src_path"/"$i" --output="$html_output_path"/"$i".html
done

}

do_recursive_pandoc "src" "output"

But if I have space in file paths or names bash will count them as multiple items in for loop, for example if I have:

./src/dir 1/foo.markdown

this script will make ./output/1 directory instead of making ./output/dir 1/ and tries converting ./src/dir and ./src/1/foo.markdown instead of ./src/dir 1/foo.markdown

How I can fix that?

Use more quotes. Don't parse the output of `find`: use its `-exec` flag or use globs. — gniourf_gniourf, Feb 05 '15 at 13:54
possible duplicate of [Recursive directory parsing with Pandoc](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11023543/recursive-directory-parsing-with-pandoc) — bonsaiviking, Feb 05 '15 at 13:57

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Feb 05 '15 at 13:52

1

you would be better off piping find into while like this:

find $markdown_src_path -name $markdown_src_file_extension 2>/dev/null | cut --delimiter='/' --fields=2- | while read i; do

answered Feb 05 '15 at 13:52

robert

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2

You should also use `read -r` in case there are other problematic characters in the file names. – tripleee Feb 06 '15 at 05:40

Microsoft Linux TM · Accepted Answer · 2015-02-09T23:35:50.203

This will do the job:

#!/bin/bash
#############################################################################
function do_recursive_pandoc {
    local src_path=$(realpath "$1") 
    local output_path=$(realpath "$2") && mkdir --parents "$output_path" 2>/dev/null
    find "$src_path" -name "*.markdown" -not -path "$output_path" -exec bash -c '
        i=$1
        o="$3""${1#$2}"
        mkdir --parents "$(dirname "$o")" 2>/dev/null
        if [ -f "$i" ]; then pandoc -rmarkdown -whtml "$i" --output="$o".html ; fi
        ' " " {} $src_path $output_path \;
}
#############################################################################
do_recursive_pandoc "src" "output"
#############################################################################

I pasted it along with a basic CSS on Gist.

space containing items in bash for-loop

2 Answers2