Iterating over each line of ls -l output

I want to iterate over each line in the output of: ls -l /some/dir/*

Right now I'm trying: for x in $(ls -l $1); do echo $x; done

However, this iterates over each element in the line separately, so I get:

-r--r-----
1
ivanevf
eng
1074
Apr
22
13:07
File1

-r--r-----
1
ivanevf
eng
1074
Apr
22
13:17
File2

But I want to iterate over each line as a whole, though. How do I do that?

Set IFS to newline, like this:

IFS='
'
for x in `ls -l $1`; do echo $x; done

Put a sub-shell around it if you don't want to set IFS permanently:

(IFS='
'
for x in `ls -l $1`; do echo $x; done)

Or use while | read instead:

ls -l $1 | while read x; do echo $x; done

One more option, which runs the while/read at the same shell level:

while read x; do echo $x; done << EOF
$(ls -l $1)
EOF

It depends what you want to do with each line. awk is a useful utility for this type of processing. Example:

 ls -l | awk '{print $9, $5}'

.. on my system prints the name and size of each item in the directory.

As already mentioned, awk is the right tool for this. If you don't want to use awk, instead of parsing output of "ls -l" line by line, you could iterate over all files and do an "ls -l" for each individual file like this:

for x in * ; do echo `ls -ld $x` ; done

You can also try the find command. If you only want files in the current directory:

> find . -d 1 -prune -ls

Run a command on each of them?

> find . -d 1 -prune -exec echo {} \;

Count lines, but only in files?

> find . -d 1 -prune -type f -exec wc -l {} \;

The read(1) utility along with output redirection of the ls(1) command will do what you want.

So, why didn't anybody suggest just using options that eliminate the parts he doesn't want to process.

On modern Debian you just get your file with:

ls --format=single-column 

Further more, you don't have to pay attention to what directory you are running it in if you use the full directory:

ls --format=single-column /root/dir/starting/point/to/target/dir/

This last command I am using the above and I get the following output:

bot@dev:~/downloaded/Daily# ls --format=single-column /home/bot/downloaded/Daily/*.gz
/home/bot/downloaded/Daily/Liq_DailyManifest_V3_US_20141119_IENT1.txt.gz
/home/bot/downloaded/Daily/Liq_DailyManifest_V3_US_20141120_IENT1.txt.gz
/home/bot/downloaded/Daily/Liq_DailyManifest_V3_US_20141121_IENT1.txt.gz