Using a variable to pass grep pattern in bash - arrays

Question

I am struggling with passing several grep patterns that are contained within a variable. This is the code I have:
#!/bin/bash
GREP="$(which grep)"
GREP_MY_OPTIONS="-c"
for i in {-2..2}
do
GREP_MY_OPTIONS+=" -e "$(date --date="$i day" +'%Y-%m-%d')
done
echo $GREP_MY_OPTIONS
IFS=$'\n'
MYARRAY=( $(${GREP} ${GREP_MY_OPTIONS} "/home/user/this path has spaces in it/"*"/abc.xyz" | ${GREP} -v :0$ ) )
This is what I wanted it to do:
determine/define where grep is
assign a variable (GREP_MY_OPTIONS) holding parameters I will pass to grep
assign several patterns to GREP_MY_OPTIONS
using grep and the patterns I have stored in $GREP_MY_OPTIONS search several files within a path that contains spaces and hold them in an array
When I use "echo $GREP_MY_OPTIONS" it is generating what I expected but when I run the script it fails with an error of:
/bin/grep: invalid option -- ' '
What am I doing wrong? If the path does not have spaces in it everything seems to work fine so I think it is something to do with the IFS but I'm not sure.

Answer 1

If you want to grep some content in a set of paths, you can do the following:
find <directory> -type f -print0 |
grep "/home/user/this path has spaces in it/\"*\"/abc.xyz" |
xargs -I {} grep <your_options> -f <patterns> {}
So that <patterns> is a file containing the patterns you want to search for in each file from directory.
Considering your answer, this shall do what you want:
find "/path\ with\ spaces/" -type f | xargs -I {} grep -H -c -e 2013-01-17 {}
From man grep:
-H, --with-filename
Print the file name for each match. This is the default when
there is more than one file to search.
Since you want to insert the elements into an array, you can do the following:
IFS=$'\n'; array=( $(find "/path\ with\ spaces/" -type f -print0 |
xargs -I {} grep -H -c -e 2013-01-17 "{}") )
And then use the values as:
echo ${array[0]}
echo ${array[1]}
echo ${array[...]}
When using variables to pass the parameters, use eval to evaluate the entire line. Do the following:
parameters="-H -c"
eval "grep ${parameters} file"

Answer 2

If you build the GREP_MY_OPTIONS as an array instead of as a simple string, you can get the original outline script to work sensibly:
#!/bin/bash
path="/home/user/this path has spaces in it"
GREP="$(which grep)"
GREP_MY_OPTIONS=("-c")
j=1
for i in {-2..2}
do
GREP_MY_OPTIONS[$((j++))]="-e"
GREP_MY_OPTIONS[$((j++))]=$(date --date="$i day" +'%Y-%m-%d')
done
IFS=$'\n'
MYARRAY=( $(${GREP} "${GREP_MY_OPTIONS[#]}" "$path/"*"/abc.xyz" | ${GREP} -v :0$ ) )
I'm not clear why you use GREP="$(which grep)" since you will execute the same grep as if you wrote grep directly — unless, I suppose, you have some alias for grep (which is then the problem; don't alias grep).

Answer 3

You can do one thing without making things complex:
First do a change directory in your script like following:
cd /home/user/this\ path\ has\ spaces\ in\ it/
$ pwd
/home/user/this path has spaces in it
or
$ cd "/home/user/this path has spaces in it/"
$ pwd
/home/user/this path has spaces in it
Then do what ever your want in your script.
$(${GREP} ${GREP_MY_OPTIONS} */abc.xyz)
EDIT :
[sgeorge#sgeorge-ld stack1]$ ls -l
total 4
drwxr-xr-x 2 sgeorge eng 4096 Jan 19 06:05 test tesd
[sgeorge#sgeorge-ld stack1]$ cat test\ tesd/file
SUKU
[sgeorge#sgeorge-ld stack1]$ grep SUKU */file
SUKU
EDIT :
[sgeorge#sgeorge-ld stack1]$ find */* -print | xargs -I {} grep SUKU {}
SUKU