I wanted to do some shell processing on the contents of a directory. To do this I needed to put the contents of the directory in an array. Fortunately this is not difficult with bash.

1. First capture the output.

   ls_output=$(ls /images)

2. Next declare an array and reference the output with this array.

   declare -a img_files
img_files=($ls_output)

3. Now you can access the array directly or loop through it.

   echo ${img_files[0]}
for img_file in ${img_files[@]}
do
  ...
done

Thanks O’Reilly’s Bash Cookbook.