shell - Turn file-per-line into bash parameters

Question

I have some command foo that produces a list of files (one per line).

I'd like to safely use that in command substitution; e.g. git checkout ... -- $(foo). Since filenames can have special characters and spaces, I'd like to avoid any word-splitting or other issues.

What's a good way to go about this? Keep in mind I anticipate needing to do this quite a bit, so it'd be nice to have a solution that's not janky (interpret however you like.)

question from:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/65938058/turn-file-per-line-into-bash-parameters

Answer 1

IFS can be set to respect spaces when making arrays:

IFS=$'
' eval 'FILES=($(foo))'

Finally, this can be used in the script as needed by doing:

git checkout ... -- "${FILES[@]}"