How to `awk` print a space-separated field which contains space characters?

Question

I am trying to print the list of all files and folders including hidden files:

ls -al | awk -F' ' '{print $9}' | xargs do_something

However, some of the files and/or folders contain space characters. How could I achieve this? Thanks.

Answer 1

$ find . -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -printf "%p\n"|xargs -i sh -c 'echo found: "{}"'
found: ./file2
found: ./folder 2
found: ./folder
found: ./file 1
found: ./ file 3

$ ls |awk '{print}'|xargs -i sh -c 'echo found "{}"'
found: file2
found: folder 2
found: folder
found: file 1

$ ls |xargs -i sh -c 'echo found "{}"'
found: file2
found: folder 2
found: folder
found: file 1

ls -A to list hidden files/folders too and exclude . and ..

Using while loop for your backup

#!/bin/bash

DIR="/home"

while IFS= read -r line; do 
    fullpath="$line"
    dirname=$(dirname "$line")
    basename=$(basename "$line")
    echo "$fullpath, $dirname, $basename"
    

    # your code
    # ...
done < <( 
    find "${DIR}" -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -printf "%T@ %p\n"| # print files/folders with TSP 
    sort -n|  # sort timestamp (maybe sort -nr)
    awk '{sub(/[^ ]+ /,"")}1' # remove first field (TSP)
)