Capturing output of find . -print0 into a bash array

Solution 1:

Shamelessly stolen from Greg's BashFAQ:

unset a i
while IFS= read -r -d $'\0' file; do
    a[i++]="$file"        # or however you want to process each file
done < <(find /tmp -type f -print0)

Note that the redirection construct used here (cmd1 < <(cmd2)) is similar to, but not quite the same as the more usual pipeline (cmd2 | cmd1) -- if the commands are shell builtins (e.g. while), the pipeline version executes them in subshells, and any variables they set (e.g. the array a) are lost when they exit. cmd1 < <(cmd2) only runs cmd2 in a subshell, so the array lives past its construction. Warning: this form of redirection is only available in bash, not even bash in sh-emulation mode; you must start your script with #!/bin/bash.

Also, because the file processing step (in this case, just a[i++]="$file", but you might want to do something fancier directly in the loop) has its input redirected, it cannot use any commands that might read from stdin. To avoid this limitation, I tend to use:

unset a i
while IFS= read -r -u3 -d $'\0' file; do
    a[i++]="$file"        # or however you want to process each file
done 3< <(find /tmp -type f -print0)

...which passes the file list via unit 3, rather than stdin.

Solution 2:

Since Bash 4.4, the builtin mapfile has the -d switch (to specify a delimiter, similar to the -d switch of the read statement), and the delimiter can be the null byte. Hence, a nice answer to the question in the title

Capturing output of find . -print0 into a bash array

is:

mapfile -d '' ary < <(find . -print0)

Solution 3:

Solution 4:

The main problem is, that the delimiter NUL (\0) is useless here, because it isn't possible to assign IFS a NUL-value. So as good programmers we take care, that the input for our program is something it is able to handle.

First we create a little program, which does this part for us:

#!/bin/bash
printf "%s" "$@" | base64

...and call it base64str (don't forget chmod +x)

Second we can now use a simple and straightforward for-loop:

for i in `find -type f -exec base64str '{}' \;`
do 
  file="`echo -n "$i" | base64 -d`"
  # do something with file
done

So the trick is, that a base64-string has no sign which causes trouble for bash - of course a xxd or something similar can also do the job.

Solution 5:

Yet another way of counting files:

find /DIR -type f -print0 | tr -dc '\0' | wc -c