Capturing output of find . -print0 into a bash array

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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.

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