[matheweis]

ls | while read file; do echo "$file"; done

... works better for the easy edge cases, but still probably has some issues. Personally I think klodolph called it; once you get into anything that has a few interesting edge cases bash becomes pretty unwieldy.

[foobar__]

The easiest way is still: for file in *; do ...; done

This works fine with spaces and other strange characters, no need to come up with more complicated ways.

If you must use find, the correct way is really tricky and uses obscure bash features like settings IFS to the empty string to split on null bytes and process substitution so that the loop doesn't run in a subshell (which would prevent it from modifying variables in the current environment):

while IFS= read -r -d '' file; do ... done < <(find /tmp -type f -print0)

See http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashFAQ/020

[matheweis]

I like that, I've never thought of or seen it, although it should've been intuitively obvious given how bash expansion works.

I think this demonstrates the point pretty well though - it takes a discussion among three of us before arriving at something that works moderately well, and we found four fairly different ways of doing it...