Case statement not properly comparing variable to string [duplicate]

Case statement not properly comparing variable to string [duplicate] - arrays

I am making an NW.js app on macOS, and want to run the app in dev mode
by double-clicking on an icon.
In the first step, I'm trying to make my shell script work.
Using VS Code on Windows (I wanted to gain time), I have created a run-nw file at the root of my project, containing this:
#!/bin/bash
cd "src"
npm install
cd ..
./tools/nwjs-sdk-v0.17.3-osx-x64/nwjs.app/Contents/MacOS/nwjs "src" &
but I get this output:
$ sh ./run-nw
: command not found
: No such file or directory
: command not found
: No such file or directory
Usage: npm <command>
where <command> is one of: (snip commands list)
(snip npm help)
npm#3.10.3 /usr/local/lib/node_modules/npm
: command not found
: No such file or directory
: command not found
Some things I don't understand.
It seems that it takes empty lines as commands.
In my editor (VS Code) I have tried to replace \r\n with \n
(in case the \r creates problems) but it changes nothing.
It seems that it doesn't find the folders
(with or without the dirname instruction),
or maybe it doesn't know about the cd command ?
It seems that it doesn't understand the install argument to npm.
The part that really weirds me out, is that it still runs the app
(if I did an npm install manually)...
Not able to make it work properly, and suspecting something weird with
the file itself, I created a new one directly on the Mac, using vim this time.
I entered the exact same instructions, and... now it works without any
issues.
A diff on the two files reveals exactly zero difference.
What can be the difference? What can make the first script not work? How can I find out?
Update
Following the accepted answer's recommendations, after the wrong line
endings came back, I checked multiple things.
It turns out that since I copied my ~/.gitconfig from my Windows
machine, I had autocrlf=true, so every time I modified the bash
file under Windows, it re-set the line endings to \r\n.
So, in addition to running dos2unix (which you will have to
install using Homebrew on a Mac), if you're using Git, check your
.gitconfig file.

Yes. Bash scripts are sensitive to line-endings, both in the script itself and in data it processes. They should have Unix-style line-endings, i.e., each line is terminated with a Line Feed character (decimal 10, hex 0A in ASCII).
DOS/Windows line endings in the script
With Windows or DOS-style line endings , each line is terminated with a Carriage Return followed by a Line Feed character. You can see this otherwise invisible character in the output of cat -v yourfile:
$ cat -v yourfile
#!/bin/bash^M
^M
cd "src"^M
npm install^M
^M
cd ..^M
./tools/nwjs-sdk-v0.17.3-osx-x64/nwjs.app/Contents/MacOS/nwjs "src" &^M
In this case, the carriage return (^M in caret notation or \r in C escape notation) is not treated as whitespace. Bash interprets the first line after the shebang (consisting of a single carriage return character) as the name of a command/program to run.
Since there is no command named ^M, it prints : command not found
Since there is no directory named "src"^M (or src^M), it prints : No such file or directory
It passes install^M instead of install as an argument to npm which causes npm to complain.
DOS/Windows line endings in input data
Like above, if you have an input file with carriage returns:
hello^M
world^M
then it will look completely normal in editors and when writing it to screen, but tools may produce strange results. For example, grep will fail to find lines that are obviously there:
$ grep 'hello$' file.txt || grep -x "hello" file.txt
(no match because the line actually ends in ^M)
Appended text will instead overwrite the line because the carriage returns moves the cursor to the start of the line:
$ sed -e 's/$/!/' file.txt
!ello
!orld
String comparison will seem to fail, even though strings appear to be the same when writing to screen:
$ a="hello"; read b < file.txt
$ if [[ "$a" = "$b" ]]
then echo "Variables are equal."
else echo "Sorry, $a is not equal to $b"
fi
Sorry, hello is not equal to hello
Solutions
The solution is to convert the file to use Unix-style line endings. There are a number of ways this can be accomplished:
This can be done using the dos2unix program:
dos2unix filename
Open the file in a capable text editor (Sublime, Notepad++, not Notepad) and configure it to save files with Unix line endings, e.g., with Vim, run the following command before (re)saving:
:set fileformat=unix
If you have a version of the sed utility that supports the -i or --in-place option, e.g., GNU sed, you could run the following command to strip trailing carriage returns:
sed -i 's/\r$//' filename
With other versions of sed, you could use output redirection to write to a new file. Be sure to use a different filename for the redirection target (it can be renamed later).
sed 's/\r$//' filename > filename.unix
Similarly, the tr translation filter can be used to delete unwanted characters from its input:
tr -d '\r' <filename >filename.unix
Cygwin Bash
With the Bash port for Cygwin, there’s a custom igncr option that can be set to ignore the Carriage Return in line endings (presumably because many of its users use native Windows programs to edit their text files).
This can be enabled for the current shell by running set -o igncr.
Setting this option applies only to the current shell process so it can be useful when sourcing files with extraneous carriage returns. If you regularly encounter shell scripts with DOS line endings and want this option to be set permanently, you could set an environment variable called SHELLOPTS (all capital letters) to include igncr. This environment variable is used by Bash to set shell options when it starts (before reading any startup files).
Useful utilities
The file utility is useful for quickly seeing which line endings are used in a text file. Here’s what it prints for for each file type:
Unix line endings: Bourne-Again shell script, ASCII text executable
Mac line endings: Bourne-Again shell script, ASCII text executable, with CR line terminators
DOS line endings: Bourne-Again shell script, ASCII text executable, with CRLF line terminators
The GNU version of the cat utility has a -v, --show-nonprinting option that displays non-printing characters.
The dos2unix utility is specifically written for converting text files between Unix, Mac and DOS line endings.
Useful links
Wikipedia has an excellent article covering the many different ways of marking the end of a line of text, the history of such encodings and how newlines are treated in different operating systems, programming languages and Internet protocols (e.g., FTP).
Files with classic Mac OS line endings
With Classic Mac OS (pre-OS X), each line was terminated with a Carriage Return (decimal 13, hex 0D in ASCII). If a script file was saved with such line endings, Bash would only see one long line like so:
#!/bin/bash^M^Mcd "src"^Mnpm install^M^Mcd ..^M./tools/nwjs-sdk-v0.17.3-osx-x64/nwjs.app/Contents/MacOS/nwjs "src" &^M
Since this single long line begins with an octothorpe (#), Bash treats the line (and the whole file) as a single comment.
Note: In 2001, Apple launched Mac OS X which was based on the BSD-derived NeXTSTEP operating system. As a result, OS X also uses Unix-style LF-only line endings and since then, text files terminated with a CR have become extremely rare. Nevertheless, I think it’s worthwhile to show how Bash would attempt to interpret such files.

On JetBrains products (PyCharm, PHPStorm, IDEA, etc.), you'll need to click on CRLF/LF to toggle between the two types of line separators (\r\n and \n).

I was trying to startup my docker container from Windows and got this:
Bash script and /bin/bash^M: bad interpreter: No such file or directory
I was using git bash and the problem was about the git config, then I just did the steps below and it worked. It will configure Git to not convert line endings on checkout:
git config --global core.autocrlf input
delete your local repository
clone it again.
Many thanks to Jason Harmon in this link:
https://forums.docker.com/t/error-while-running-docker-code-in-powershell/34059/6
Before that, I tried this, that didn't works:
dos2unix scriptname.sh
sed -i -e 's/\r$//' scriptname.sh
sed -i -e 's/^M$//' scriptname.sh

If you're using the read command to read from a file (or pipe) that is (or might be) in DOS/Windows format, you can take advantage of the fact that read will trim whitespace from the beginning and ends of lines. If you tell it that carriage returns are whitespace (by adding them to the IFS variable), it'll trim them from the ends of lines.
In bash (or zsh or ksh), that means you'd replace this standard idiom:
IFS= read -r somevar # This will not trim CR
with this:
IFS=$'\r' read -r somevar # This *will* trim CR
(Note: the -r option isn't related to this, it's just usually a good idea to avoid mangling backslashes.)
If you're not using the IFS= prefix (e.g. because you want to split the data into fields), then you'd replace this:
read -r field1 field2 ... # This will not trim CR
with this:
IFS=$' \t\n\r' read -r field1 field2 ... # This *will* trim CR
If you're using a shell that doesn't support the $'...' quoting mode (e.g. dash, the default /bin/sh on some Linux distros), or your script even might be run with such a shell, then you need to get a little more complex:
cr="$(printf '\r')"
IFS="$cr" read -r somevar # Read trimming *only* CR
IFS="$IFS$cr" read -r field1 field2 ... # Read trimming CR and whitespace, and splitting fields
Note that normally, when you change IFS, you should put it back to normal as soon as possible to avoid weird side effects; but in all these cases, it's a prefix to the read command, so it only affects that one command and doesn't have to be reset afterward.

Coming from a duplicate, if the problem is that you have files whose names contain ^M at the end, you can rename them with
for f in *$'\r'; do
mv "$f" "${f%$'\r'}"
done
You properly want to fix whatever caused these files to have broken names in the first place (probably a script which created them should be dos2unixed and then rerun?) but sometimes this is not feasible.
The $'\r' syntax is Bash-specific; if you have a different shell, maybe you need to use some other notation. Perhaps see also Difference between sh and bash

Since VS Code is being used, we can see CRLF or LF in the bottom right depending on what's being used and if we click on it we can change between them (LF is being used in below example):
We can also use the "Change End of Line Sequence" command from the command pallet. Whatever's easier to remember since they're functionally the same.

One more way to get rid of the unwanted CR ('\r') character is to run the tr command, for example:
$ tr -d '\r' < dosScript.py > nixScript.py

I ran into this issue when I use git with WSL.
git has a feature where it changes the line-ending of files according to the OS you are using, on Windows it make sure the line endings are \r\n which is not compatible with Linux which uses only \n.
You can resolve this problem by adding a file name .gitattributes to your git root directory and add lines as following:
config/* text eol=lf
run.sh text eol=lf
In this example all files inside config directory will have only line-feed line ending and run.sh file as well.

For Notepad++ users, this can be solved by:

The simplest way on MAC / Linux - create a file using 'touch' command, open this file with VI or VIM editor, paste your code and save. This would automatically remove the windows characters.

If you are using a text editor like BBEdit you can do it at the status bar. There is a selection where you can switch.

For IntelliJ users, here is the solution for writing Linux script.
Use LF - Unix and masOS (\n)

Scripts may call each other.
An even better magic solution is to convert all scripts in the folder/subfolders:
find . -name "*.sh" -exec sed -i -e 's/\r$//' {} +
You can use dos2unix too but many servers do not have it installed by default.

For the sake of completeness, I'll point out another solution which can solve this problem permanently without the need to run dos2unix all the time:
sudo ln -s /bin/bash `printf 'bash\r'`

Related

Bash array behaving strangely from sed usage [duplicate]

Yes. Bash scripts are sensitive to line-endings, both in the script itself and in data it processes. They should have Unix-style line-endings, i.e., each line is terminated with a Line Feed character (decimal 10, hex 0A in ASCII).
DOS/Windows line endings in the script
With Windows or DOS-style line endings , each line is terminated with a Carriage Return followed by a Line Feed character. You can see this otherwise invisible character in the output of cat -v yourfile:
$ cat -v yourfile
#!/bin/bash^M
^M
cd "src"^M
npm install^M
^M
cd ..^M
./tools/nwjs-sdk-v0.17.3-osx-x64/nwjs.app/Contents/MacOS/nwjs "src" &^M
In this case, the carriage return (^M in caret notation or \r in C escape notation) is not treated as whitespace. Bash interprets the first line after the shebang (consisting of a single carriage return character) as the name of a command/program to run.
Since there is no command named ^M, it prints : command not found
Since there is no directory named "src"^M (or src^M), it prints : No such file or directory
It passes install^M instead of install as an argument to npm which causes npm to complain.
DOS/Windows line endings in input data
Like above, if you have an input file with carriage returns:
hello^M
world^M
then it will look completely normal in editors and when writing it to screen, but tools may produce strange results. For example, grep will fail to find lines that are obviously there:
$ grep 'hello$' file.txt || grep -x "hello" file.txt
(no match because the line actually ends in ^M)
Appended text will instead overwrite the line because the carriage returns moves the cursor to the start of the line:
$ sed -e 's/$/!/' file.txt
!ello
!orld
String comparison will seem to fail, even though strings appear to be the same when writing to screen:
$ a="hello"; read b < file.txt
$ if [[ "$a" = "$b" ]]
then echo "Variables are equal."
else echo "Sorry, $a is not equal to $b"
fi
Sorry, hello is not equal to hello
Solutions
The solution is to convert the file to use Unix-style line endings. There are a number of ways this can be accomplished:
This can be done using the dos2unix program:
dos2unix filename
Open the file in a capable text editor (Sublime, Notepad++, not Notepad) and configure it to save files with Unix line endings, e.g., with Vim, run the following command before (re)saving:
:set fileformat=unix
If you have a version of the sed utility that supports the -i or --in-place option, e.g., GNU sed, you could run the following command to strip trailing carriage returns:
sed -i 's/\r$//' filename
With other versions of sed, you could use output redirection to write to a new file. Be sure to use a different filename for the redirection target (it can be renamed later).
sed 's/\r$//' filename > filename.unix
Similarly, the tr translation filter can be used to delete unwanted characters from its input:
tr -d '\r' <filename >filename.unix
Cygwin Bash
With the Bash port for Cygwin, there’s a custom igncr option that can be set to ignore the Carriage Return in line endings (presumably because many of its users use native Windows programs to edit their text files).
This can be enabled for the current shell by running set -o igncr.
Setting this option applies only to the current shell process so it can be useful when sourcing files with extraneous carriage returns. If you regularly encounter shell scripts with DOS line endings and want this option to be set permanently, you could set an environment variable called SHELLOPTS (all capital letters) to include igncr. This environment variable is used by Bash to set shell options when it starts (before reading any startup files).
Useful utilities
The file utility is useful for quickly seeing which line endings are used in a text file. Here’s what it prints for for each file type:
Unix line endings: Bourne-Again shell script, ASCII text executable
Mac line endings: Bourne-Again shell script, ASCII text executable, with CR line terminators
DOS line endings: Bourne-Again shell script, ASCII text executable, with CRLF line terminators
The GNU version of the cat utility has a -v, --show-nonprinting option that displays non-printing characters.
The dos2unix utility is specifically written for converting text files between Unix, Mac and DOS line endings.
Useful links
Wikipedia has an excellent article covering the many different ways of marking the end of a line of text, the history of such encodings and how newlines are treated in different operating systems, programming languages and Internet protocols (e.g., FTP).
Files with classic Mac OS line endings
With Classic Mac OS (pre-OS X), each line was terminated with a Carriage Return (decimal 13, hex 0D in ASCII). If a script file was saved with such line endings, Bash would only see one long line like so:
#!/bin/bash^M^Mcd "src"^Mnpm install^M^Mcd ..^M./tools/nwjs-sdk-v0.17.3-osx-x64/nwjs.app/Contents/MacOS/nwjs "src" &^M
Since this single long line begins with an octothorpe (#), Bash treats the line (and the whole file) as a single comment.
Note: In 2001, Apple launched Mac OS X which was based on the BSD-derived NeXTSTEP operating system. As a result, OS X also uses Unix-style LF-only line endings and since then, text files terminated with a CR have become extremely rare. Nevertheless, I think it’s worthwhile to show how Bash would attempt to interpret such files.

On JetBrains products (PyCharm, PHPStorm, IDEA, etc.), you'll need to click on CRLF/LF to toggle between the two types of line separators (\r\n and \n).

I was trying to startup my docker container from Windows and got this:
Bash script and /bin/bash^M: bad interpreter: No such file or directory
I was using git bash and the problem was about the git config, then I just did the steps below and it worked. It will configure Git to not convert line endings on checkout:
git config --global core.autocrlf input
delete your local repository
clone it again.
Many thanks to Jason Harmon in this link:
https://forums.docker.com/t/error-while-running-docker-code-in-powershell/34059/6
Before that, I tried this, that didn't works:
dos2unix scriptname.sh
sed -i -e 's/\r$//' scriptname.sh
sed -i -e 's/^M$//' scriptname.sh

If you're using the read command to read from a file (or pipe) that is (or might be) in DOS/Windows format, you can take advantage of the fact that read will trim whitespace from the beginning and ends of lines. If you tell it that carriage returns are whitespace (by adding them to the IFS variable), it'll trim them from the ends of lines.
In bash (or zsh or ksh), that means you'd replace this standard idiom:
IFS= read -r somevar # This will not trim CR
with this:
IFS=$'\r' read -r somevar # This *will* trim CR
(Note: the -r option isn't related to this, it's just usually a good idea to avoid mangling backslashes.)
If you're not using the IFS= prefix (e.g. because you want to split the data into fields), then you'd replace this:
read -r field1 field2 ... # This will not trim CR
with this:
IFS=$' \t\n\r' read -r field1 field2 ... # This *will* trim CR
If you're using a shell that doesn't support the $'...' quoting mode (e.g. dash, the default /bin/sh on some Linux distros), or your script even might be run with such a shell, then you need to get a little more complex:
cr="$(printf '\r')"
IFS="$cr" read -r somevar # Read trimming *only* CR
IFS="$IFS$cr" read -r field1 field2 ... # Read trimming CR and whitespace, and splitting fields
Note that normally, when you change IFS, you should put it back to normal as soon as possible to avoid weird side effects; but in all these cases, it's a prefix to the read command, so it only affects that one command and doesn't have to be reset afterward.

Coming from a duplicate, if the problem is that you have files whose names contain ^M at the end, you can rename them with
for f in *$'\r'; do
mv "$f" "${f%$'\r'}"
done
You properly want to fix whatever caused these files to have broken names in the first place (probably a script which created them should be dos2unixed and then rerun?) but sometimes this is not feasible.
The $'\r' syntax is Bash-specific; if you have a different shell, maybe you need to use some other notation. Perhaps see also Difference between sh and bash

Since VS Code is being used, we can see CRLF or LF in the bottom right depending on what's being used and if we click on it we can change between them (LF is being used in below example):
We can also use the "Change End of Line Sequence" command from the command pallet. Whatever's easier to remember since they're functionally the same.

For Notepad++ users, this can be solved by:

One more way to get rid of the unwanted CR ('\r') character is to run the tr command, for example:
$ tr -d '\r' < dosScript.py > nixScript.py

I ran into this issue when I use git with WSL.
git has a feature where it changes the line-ending of files according to the OS you are using, on Windows it make sure the line endings are \r\n which is not compatible with Linux which uses only \n.
You can resolve this problem by adding a file name .gitattributes to your git root directory and add lines as following:
config/* text eol=lf
run.sh text eol=lf
In this example all files inside config directory will have only line-feed line ending and run.sh file as well.

The simplest way on MAC / Linux - create a file using 'touch' command, open this file with VI or VIM editor, paste your code and save. This would automatically remove the windows characters.

If you are using a text editor like BBEdit you can do it at the status bar. There is a selection where you can switch.

For IntelliJ users, here is the solution for writing Linux script.
Use LF - Unix and masOS (\n)

Scripts may call each other.
An even better magic solution is to convert all scripts in the folder/subfolders:
find . -name "*.sh" -exec sed -i -e 's/\r$//' {} +
You can use dos2unix too but many servers do not have it installed by default.

For the sake of completeness, I'll point out another solution which can solve this problem permanently without the need to run dos2unix all the time:
sudo ln -s /bin/bash `printf 'bash\r'`

How to copy files with special characters in their names with TCL's exec?

I'm trying to upload files containing special characters on our platform via the exec command but the characters are always interpreted and it fails.
For example if I try to upload a mémo.txt file I get the following error:
/bin/cp: cannot create regular file `/path/to/dir/m\351mo.txt': No such file or directory
The UTF8 is correctly configured on the system and if I run the command on the shell it works fine.
Here is the TCL code:
exec /bin/cp $tmp_filename $dest_path
How can I make it work?

The core of the problem is what encoding is being used to communicate with the operating system. For exec and filenames, that encoding is whatever is returned by the encoding system command (Tcl has a pretty good guess at what the correct value for that is when the Tcl library starts up, but very occasionally gets it wrong). On my computer, that command returns utf-8 which says (correctly!) that strings passed to (and received from) the OS are UTF-8.
You should be able to use the file copy command instead of doing exec /bin/cp, which will be helpful here as that's got less layers of trickiness (it avoids going through an external program which can impose its own problems). We'll assume that that's being done:
set tmp_filename "foobar.txt"; # <<< fill in the right value, of course
set dest_path "/path/to/dir/mémo.txt"
file copy $tmp_filename $dest_path
If that fails, we need to work out why. The most likely problems relate to the encoding though, and can go wrong in multiple ways that interact horribly. Alas, the details matter. In particular, the encoding for a path depends on the actual filesystem (it's formally a parameter when the filesystem is created) and can vary on Unix between parts of a path when you have a mount within another mount.
If the worst comes to the worst, you can put Tcl into ISO 8859-1 mode and then do all the encoding yourself (as ISO 8859-1 is the “just use the bytes I tell you” encoding); encoding convertto is also useful in this case. Be aware that this can generate filenames that cause trouble for other programs, but it's at least able to let you get at it.
encoding system iso98859-1
file copy $tmp_filename [encoding convertto utf-8 $dest_path]
Care might be needed to convert different parts of the path correctly in this case: you're taking full responsibility for what's going on.
If you're on Windows, please just let Tcl handle the details. Tcl uses the Wide (Unicode) Windows API directly so you can pretend that none of these problems exist. (There are other problems instead.)
On macOS, please leave encoding system alone as it is correct. Macs have a very opinionated approach to encodings.

I already tried the file copy command but it says error copying
"/tmp/file7k5kqg" to "/path/to/dir/mémo.txt": no such file or
directory
My reading of your problem is that, for some reason, your Tcl is set to iso8859-1 ([encoding system]), while the executing environment (shell) is set to utf-8. This explains why Donal's suggestion works for you:
encoding system iso8859-1
file copy $tmp_filename [encoding convertto utf-8 $dest_path]
This will safely pass utf-8 encoded bytearray down to any syscall: é or \xc3\xa9 or \u00e9. Watch:
% binary encode hex [encoding convertto utf-8 é]
c3a9
% encoding system iso8859-1; exec xxd << [encoding convertto utf-8 é]
00000000: c3a9 ..
This is equivalent to [encoding system] also being set to utf-8 (as to be expected in an otherwise utf-8 environment):
% encoding system
utf-8
% exec xxd << é
00000000: c3a9 ..
What you are experiencing (without any intervention) seems to be a re-coding of the Tcl internal encoding to iso8859-1 on the way out from Tcl (because of [encoding system], as Donal describes), and a follow-up (and faulty) re-coding of this iso8859-1 value into the utf-8 environment.
Watch the difference (\xe9 vs. \xc3\xa9):
% encoding system iso8859-1
% encoding system
iso8859-1
% exec xxd << é
00000000: e9
The problem it then seems is that \xe9 is to be interpreted in your otherwise utf-8 env, like:
$ locale
LANG="de_AT.UTF-8"
...
$ echo -ne '\xe9'
?
$ touch `echo -ne 'm\xe9mo.txt'`
touch: m?mo.txt: Illegal byte sequence
$ touch mémo.txt
$ ls mémo.txt
mémo.txt
$ cp `echo -ne 'm\xe9mo.txt'` b.txt
cp: m?mo.txt: No such file or directory
But:
$ cp `echo -ne 'm\xc3\xa9mo.txt'` b.txt
$ ls b.txt
b.txt
Your options:
(1) You need to find out why Tcl picks up iso8859-1, to begin with. How did you obtain your installation? Self-compiled? What are the details (version)?
(2) You may proceed as Donal suggests, or alternatively, set encoding system utf-8 explicitly.
encoding system utf-8
file copy $tmp_filename $dest_path

Line too long in 'vi'. Commands alternatives to navigate to the last lines of a file

I try to open a file with vi, but it says:
Line too long
I read topic vi: Line too long, but the only two solutions (install Vim, use sed, AWK, fold, less) aren't viable.
The file that I pretend to open, has more than 400.000 lines, and commands like more, or sed, or fold, or view don't work, because I don't know the specific line number. Installing another program is descarted.
I want navigate in a file, especially on the last lines.
The operating system is a SunOS 5.8, and the commands or editors or programs that you will propose to me has to be installed on this version.
Initially I discarded the tail command, but I think that is the unique solution.

Finally the solution using "tail" with arguments of the last lines to show.
With this command and "more" I can navigate to the last lines and jump over the line with the too-long-problem:
tail -1000 file-with-line-too-long.txt | more
It's a managed and limited machine without permissions to install any programs.

:$ moves you to the beginning of the last line.
It also works from the command line (you may have to escape the $):
vi +$ /path/to/file

ls piped into the command line

I have been trying to pipe in the results from ls into the command line for a C program I am writing (in Unix). I want to be able to have an index of the files and so I was planning on using argv. This is how I thought it should work:
./foo &(ls ~/path)
It doesn't work — what's the correct way to pass the output of ls as arguments to the command?

Your syntax is a bit off...
./foo $(ls ~/path)
Do note that this will choke on files with certain characters in them. Use an array instead to fix this.
pushd ~/path
files=(*)
popd
./foo "${files[#]}"

The notation you specified does two things:
./foo &
runs the program foo in the background (with no arguments other than its command name). Then:
(ls ~/path)
runs the ls command in a sub-shell (which, in this context, is the same as running it in the main shell). The problem is you intended (or need) to use $ in place of &.
./foo $(ls ~/path)
This runs the command ls ~/path and captures the output, which is split into words (using the separators listed in the $IFS variable). Each word is then supplied as an argument to the command ./foo, as you required.
We can then debate the wisdom of using the output of ls like that, but unless you have file names containing spaces (tabs, newlines etc,) you will be OK.

You know how Unix tools accept glob patterns, so you can do cat *.txt or rm ~/Pictures/Vacation*.jpg, without having to pipe/expand ls?
That's an ability your shell gives your program for free!
Just use ./foo ~/path/* and argv[1] will contain /home/you/path/fileone, argv[2] will contain /home/you/path/filetwo, and so forth.
These filenames may be relative or absolute, but can always be passed directly to open/fopen/execve or whichever function you want to use.
Using ls as you describe will only give you the last part of the filename with no directory, so you won't know where the files are to do anything with them (though if that's what you want, just use basename(argv[1])).

Preparing an input for a shell

I'm writing a simple shell in C and I want to implement the user input the same way the other shells do, or at least how bash does (never used others). If you enter a command with random whitespace then it can still run the command:
ex.
ls -1
Obviously strtok() wont work on this when separating the command and args...
How does bash do this? Should I search through the thousands of lines of the source code?

You can skip spaces while you're parsing your command:
while(*p==' '||*p=='\t') ++p;

whitespaces aren't problem. You can remove all whitespace which is not necesery.
But I'm not sure that shell do it in this way. I think shell may search all option in string which is input. Example
ls -a -l and ls -l -a
is the same. Maybe better will be if you will be search all possible option, or interpret all char step after step. Example, firstly search all "-", after it interpret option which is after "-"

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