iterate over selected lines

[tessus]

Maybe this is a bash question, but on the other side it could be that I missed an fzf option that makes that easier (with less code).

RESULT=$(cat <<EOF |fzf -m
line1
line2 has spaces
line3
EOF
)

while IFS= read -r -d $'\n' line <&3
do
    echo $line
done 3<<<"$RESULT"

Usually I just use a for line in $RESULT loop, but this naturally only works if there are no spaces. Thus I was wondering, if there is a better way to handle this.

[agammann]

You can read fzf's newline-separated selections directly instead of storing them in RESULT and splitting them:

while IFS= read -r line; do
  printf '%s\n' "$line"
done < <(printf '%s\n' 'line1' 'line2 has spaces' 'line3' | fzf --multi)

IFS= and -r keep spaces and backslashes intact, and process substitution keeps the loop in the current shell if you need its variables afterward. I tested the same loop with fzf 0.74.4 (using --filter line to select noninteractively); line2 has spaces remained one value.