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I'm learning shell scripting and found a very confusing situation:

  1. I retrieve all contents of the current directory using conteudo="$(ls)";
  2. Issuing echo $conteudo prints to the terminal "data emptydirectories.sh media obb", that's ok;
  3. Then the script must run echo `expr index "$conteudo" " "` , which prints zero to the terminal, what got me already confused, 'cause I expected it to print 4;
  4. The the last command is echo ${conteudo:0:1}, which prints "d" in the terminal (clown face).

I want to understand why the character changes in the two situations. I first imagined that the quotation was interfering in the way the string is being processed, but haven't found anything about it, and changing the quotation use either makes no effect or returns errors.

Cícero Augusto
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    See: [Why *not* parse `ls`?](http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/128985/why-not-parse-ls) – Cyrus Aug 14 '22 at 00:29
  • Thanks, it helped a lot! Could you make your comment an answer so I can mark the question as answered? – Cícero Augusto Aug 14 '22 at 02:38
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    `conteudo ` doesn't contain any spaces; it has newlines between filenames, but `echo $conteudo ` shows spaces because the variable isn't double-quoted. See ["I just assigned a variable, but `echo $variable` shows something else"](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/29378566) and ["When should I double-quote a parameter expansion?"](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/55023461) (short answer: almost always). [shellcheck.net](https://www.shellcheck.net) is good at pointing out this and a number of other common mistakes. – Gordon Davisson Aug 14 '22 at 02:46

1 Answers1

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The output "data emptydirectories.sh media obb" shown on the screen is not actually separated by space, those file names are separated by new line. If you do echo "$conteudo", you will see the true output. A simple way to convert those new lines to spaces is assigning it to another variable, aaa=$(echo $conteudo), then you will get your expected result.

$ conteudo="$(ls)"
$ echo $conteudo
access.log g_access_log.loh result.lst sublogs thislog.2020-02-25T10.28.01.956-f4b54c
$ echo "$conteudo"
access.log
g_access_log.loh
result.lst
sublogs
thislog.2020-02-25T10.28.01.956-f4b54c
$ conteudo=$(echo $conteudo)
$ echo "$conteudo"
access.log g_access_log.loh result.lst sublogs thislog.2020-02-25T10.28.01.956-f4b54c
$ echo `expr index "$conteudo" " "`
11
$ echo ${conteudo:0:1}
a
WeDBA
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