On Fri, Dec 15, 2023 at 01:42:14PM +0100, Nicolas George wrote: > Also, note that file names can also contain newlines in general. The > only robust delimiter is the NUL character.
True. In order to be 100% safe, the OP's code would need to look more like this: readarray -d '' fndar < <( find "$sdir" ... -printf 'stuff\0' | sort -z --otherflags ) The -d '' option for readarray requires bash 4.4 or higher. If this script needs to run on bash 4.3 or older, you'd need to use a loop instead of readarray. This may look a bit inscrutable, but the purpose is to ensure that a NUL delimiter is used at every step. First, find -printf '...\0' will print a NUL character after each filename-and-stuff. Second, sort -z uses NUL as its record separator (instead of newline), and produces sorted output that also uses NUL. Finally, readarray -d '' uses the NUL character as its record separator. The final result is an array containing each filename-and-stuff produced by find, in the order determined by sort, even if some of the filenames contain newline characters.