How to manipulate filenames with whitespace using IFS in dash shell?

Question

I try to print and manipulate all filenames in current directory and there are some filenames containing whitespace. But when I use IFS=$'\n’ to delimite filenames, it also remove character "n" from filenames. Here is my code

#!/bin/dash
IFS=$'\n'
for file1 in $(ls)
do
    echo "$file1"
done

It should print

apple.txt
different.txt    #
empty.txt
hello  word.txt
ifstest.sh
one.txt          #
same.txt

But the result is

apple.txt
differe    #
t.txt      #
empty.txt
hello  word.txt
ifstest.sh
o          #
e.txt      #
same.txt

What should I do to avoid that?

Answer 1

The problem comes from the fact that you are using ls together with the loop.

If you don't need hidden files (i.e. those where the name starts with a . to be included), you can achieve your goal with

for file1 in *
do
  echo "$file1"
done

I assume that you want to do more processing with the file than just writing its name to stdout, because if you want to do the latter, you could do without a loop and simply write

ls -1

or (to include hidden files)

ls -1A

The -1 ensures that the filenames are output at the start of the line. Without this option, ls would prepend each file name with a single space.