Escape spaces in bash script not working

Question

Nothing I've tried works. Look at the grep to array lines in the script below. Escaping seems to do nothing. But if I make a statically assigned array It's fine.

Such as:

files=(somefile.txt
some\ other\ file.pdf
"yet another file.txt")

This does not work:

#!/bin/bash
find . -name "$1" |
(
        cat - > /tmp/names
        file -N --mime-type --files-from /tmp/names
) |
(
        cat - > /tmp/mimes
#       files=("$(grep -o '^[^:]*' /tmp/mimes)") #one element array
#       files=($(grep -o '^[^:]*' /tmp/mimes)) #files with spaces end up split in to several elements
#       files=($(grep -o '^[^:]*' /tmp/mimes | sed 's/ /\\ /g')) #same but with \ terminated strings
        files=($(grep -o '^[^:]*' /tmp/mimes | cat <(echo '"') - <(echo '"')))
        mimes=($(grep -o '[^:]*$' /tmp/mimes))

        total=${#files[*]}
        for (( i=0; i<=$(( $total -1 )); i++ ))
                do
                echo Mime: "${mimes[$i]}" File: "${files[$i]}"
        done
        printf "$i\n"
)

Edit: Clarification

file /tmp/mimes contains:

./New Text.txt: text/plain

If I grep it to get every thing before the ":"

grep -o '^[^:]*' /tmp/mimes

it outputs: ./New Text.txt

I want to put this output into an array, but it has a space, so I escape the space using sed.

files=($(grep -o '^[^:]*' /tmp/mimes | sed 's/ /\\ /g'))

This does not work. I end up with files[0] = "./New\" and files[1] = "Text.txt"

My question is why doesn't escaping the space work?

If I do:

files=(./New\ Text.txt)

It does work however files[0] = "./New Text.txt" Why does escaping when you do it manually work but when it's the output of grep and sed it doesn't work. It seems like the behaviour of creating an array is inconsistent.

Answer 1

If you want to separate file names by newlines, set IFS to $'\n' and turn off globbing:

set -f
IFS=$'\n' files=($(grep -o '^[^:]*' /tmp/mimes))
set +f

Note that it breaks if your filenames contain newlines (in addition to colons, which break due to the way you extract the names with grep).