read input in bash scrip that is a directory with spaces in the path

Question

(This question already has answers here): question from:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/66056780/read-input-in-bash-scrip-that-is-a-directory-with-spaces-in-the-path

Answer 1

I think it is reading the spaces as separate variables

It does not, as you can easily verify with this:

read -p 'Enter string:'  x
echo "Entered: >>>$x<<<"

If you dislike quoting your variables (to avoid word splitting), you may consider switching from bash to Zsh. Where you have to write "$x" in bash, you would simply write $x in Zsh.

Hence, you would have to write

for file in "$directory"

but this would loop just one iteration, with file bound to the content of the variable directory. For looping over the entries in this directory, you would do a

for dirent in "$directory"/*