Dealing with whitespaces in file names after git grep -l

Question

I'm trying to run the script below and I'm struggling with pathspec error when the filename has whitespaces.

I have already read some other posts around here, but since I am not an expert I was not able to convert the ideas in a solution to this piece of code.

#!/bin/sh
#
for file in $(git grep -l -i '#private') ; do
    git rm "$file"
    echo "$file is private."
done

Does anyone have an idea?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Short answer: see BashFAQ #20: "How can I find and safely handle file names containing newlines, spaces or both?". Also, you should almost never use for var in $(something) -- it treats all whitespace as delimiters, tries to expand anything that looks like a wildcard, and generally does things you don't want it to do.

Solution: Use git grep --null to get null-delimited output, and use a while IFS= read -r -d '' loop to read filenames from that:

#!/bin/bash
#
while IFS= read -r -d '' file; do
    git rm "$file"
    echo "$file is private."
done < <(git grep -l --null -i '#private')

Note that this uses several bash features that other shells may not support, so it's important that it be run with bash, not just plain sh.