Avoiding Common Mistakes
This section is in here for 2 reasons. It will save you a LOT of trouble, and it's my biggest bash related pet peeve.
When people are learning bash they often want to iterate over a list of files in a directory, so they take this approach:
#!/bin/bash
for file in $(ls); do
echo "$file"
done
The problem is that this will fail if a file has a space in its name or a newline character (this is possible!). The correct way to do this is to used a bash extension called a glob. A glob is like a wildcard
for file in *; do
echo "$file"
done
This approach will properly delimit file names.
More information about that can be found here http://mywiki.wooledge.org/ParsingLs
