Looping through the elements of a path variable in Bash

Question

I want to loop through a path list that I have gotten from an echo $VARIABLE command.

For example:

echo $MANPATH will return

/usr/lib:/usr/sfw/lib:/usr/info

So that is three different paths, each separated by a colon. I want to loop though each of those paths. Is there a way to do that? Thanks.

Thanks for all the replies so far, it looks like I actually don't need a loop after all. I just need a way to take out the colon so I can run one ls command on those three paths.

user_642372 · Answer

Combining ideas from:

https://stackoverflow.com/a/29949759 - gniourf_gniourf
https://stackoverflow.com/a/31017384 - Yi H.

code:

PATHVAR='foo:bar baz:spam:eggs:'  # demo path with space and empty
printf '%s:\0' "$PATHVAR" | while IFS=: read -d: -r p; do
    echo $p
done | cat -n

output:

1   foo
2   bar baz
3   spam
4   eggs
5

user_10761353 · Answer

OP's update wants to ls the resulting folders, and has pointed out that ls only requires a space-separated list.

ls $(echo $PATH | tr ':' ' ') is nice and simple and should fit the bill nicely.

Looping through the elements of a path variable in Bash

10 Answers