Removing files with spaces in their names in Linux (using IFS)

In UNIX it's uncommon to have files with spaces but it can happen. Consider a situation wherein I have a couple of space separated files and I'd like to remove some of them.

[root@pbox test]# ls -l
total 0
drwxr-xr-x. 2 root root 6 Aug 30 14:25 abc
drwxr-xr-x. 2 root root 6 Aug 30 14:25 def
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 0 Aug 30 14:17 my file 1
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 0 Aug 30 14:17 my file 2
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 0 Aug 30 14:17 my file 3
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 0 Nov  7  2017 my file 4
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 0 Nov  7  2020 my file 5
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 0 Nov  7  2017 my file 6
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 0 Aug 30 14:24 my file 7

I'd like to remove files modified in the month of August.

[root@pbox test]# ls -l |grep -i ^-|grep -i Aug
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 0 Aug 30 14:17 my file 1
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 0 Aug 30 14:17 my file 2
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 0 Aug 30 14:17 my file 3
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 0 Aug 30 14:24 my file 7


Now if I try to run the for loop to iterate over the required files I get an unexpected result because of the spaces:

[root@pbox test]# for i in $(ls -l |grep -i ^-|grep -i Aug| awk '{print $9, $10, $11}') ; do echo "$file to remove is $i" ; done
 to remove is my
 to remove is file
 to remove is 1
 to remove is my
 to remove is file
 to remove is 2
 to remove is my
 to remove is file
 to remove is 3
 to remove is my
 to remove is file
 to remove is 7

This is because the default input field separator is a space character so whenever the for loop sees a space it treats the following string as a new field.

To fix this we'll modify our input field separator by changing the value of the IFS variable.

[root@pbox test]# IFS=$'\n'

[root@pbox test]# for i in $(ls -l |grep -i ^-|grep -i Aug| awk '{print $9, $10, $11}') ; do echo "$file to remove is $i" ; done

 to remove is my file 1

 to remove is my file 2

 to remove is my file 3

 to remove is my file 7

[root@pbox test]#

Now instead of doing an echo if we'd like to remove the files we could simply type the following:

[root@pbox test]# for i in $(ls -l |grep -i ^-|grep -i Aug| awk '{print $9, $10, $11}') ; do rm $i ; done

rm: remove regular empty file ‘my file 1’? y

rm: remove regular empty file ‘my file 2’? y

rm: remove regular empty file ‘my file 3’? y

rm: remove regular empty file ‘my file 7’? y

And the files are now gone.

[root@pbox test]# ls -ltr

total 0

drwxr-xr-x. 2 root root 6 Aug 30 14:25 def

drwxr-xr-x. 2 root root 6 Aug 30 14:25 abc

-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 0 Nov  7  2017 my file 4

-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 0 Nov  7  2017 my file 6

-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 0 Nov  7  2020 my file 5