Using find . -print0 seems to be the only safe way of obtaining a list of files in bash due to the possibility of filenames containing spaces, newlines, quotation marks etc. However, I'm having a hard time actually making find's output useful within bash or with other command line utilities. The only way I have managed to make use of the output is by piping it to perl, and changing perl's IFS to null: find . -print0 | perl -e '$/="\0"; @files=<>; print $#files;' This example prints the number of files found, avoiding the danger of newlines in filenames corrupting the count, as would occur with: find . | wc -l As most command line programs do not support null-delimited input, I figure the best thing would be to capture the output of find . -print0 in a bash array, like I have done in the perl snippet above, and then continue with the task, whatever it may be. How can I do this? This doesn't work: find . -print0 | ( IFS=$'\0' ; array=( $( cat ) ) ; echo ${#array[@]} ) A much more general question might be: How can I do useful things with lists of files in bash?