Trouble iterating through all files in directory - bash

Question

Part of my Bash script's intended function is to accept a directory name and then iterate through every file.
Here is part of my code:
#! /bin/bash
# sameln --- remove duplicate copies of files in specified directory
D=$1
cd $D #go to directory specified as default input
fileNum=0 #save file numbers
DIR=".*|*"
for f in $DIR #for every file in the directory
do
files[$fileNum]=$f #save that file into the array
fileNum=$((fileNum+1)) #increment the fileNum
echo aFile
done
The echo statement is for testing purposes. I passed as an argument the name of a directory with four regular files, and I expected my output to look like:
aFile
aFile
aFile
aFile
but the echo statement only shows up once.

Answer 1

A single operation
Use find for this, it's perfect for it.
find <dirname> -maxdepth 1 -type f -exec echo "{}" \;
The flags explained: maxdepth defines how deep int he hierarchy you want to look (dirs in dirs in dirs), type f defines files, as opposed to type d for dirs. And exec allows you to process the found file/dir, which is can be accessed through {}. You can alternatively pass it to a bash function to perform more tasks.
This simple bash script takes a dir as argument and lists all it's files:
#!/bin/bash
find "$1" -maxdepth 1 -type f -exec echo "{}" \;
Note that the last line is identical to find "$1" -maxdepth 1 -type f -print0.
Performing multiple tasks
Using find one can also perform multiple tasks by either piping to xargs or while read, but I prefer to use a function. An example:
#!/bin/bash
function dostuff {
# echo filename
echo "filename: $1"
# remove extension from file
mv "$1" "${1%.*}"
# get containing dir of file
dir="${1%/*}"
# get filename without containing dirs
file="${1##*/}"
# do more stuff like echoing results
echo "containing dir = $dir and file was called $file"
}; export -f dostuff
# export the function so you can call it in a subshell (important!!!)
find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -exec bash -c 'dostuff "{}"' \;
Note that the function needs to be exported, as you can see. This so you can call it in a subshell, which will be opened by executing bash -c 'dostuff'. To test it out, I suggest your comment to mv command in dostuff otherwise you will remove all your extensions haha.
Also note that this is safe for weird characters like spaces in filenames so no worries there.
Closing note
If you decide to go with the find command, which is a great choice, I advise you read up on it because it is a very powerful tool. A simple man find will teach you a lot and you will learn a lot of useful options to find. You can for instance quit from find once it has found a result, this can be handy to check if dirs contain videos or not for example in a rapid way. It's truly an amazing tool that can be used on various occasions and often you'll be done with a one liner (kinda like awk).

Answer 2

You can directly read the files into the array, then iterate through them:
#! /bin/bash
cd $1
files=(*)
for f in "${files[#]}"
do
echo $f
done

Answer 3

If you are iterating only files below a single directory, you are better off using simple filename/path expansion to avoid certain uncommon filename issues. The following will iterate through all files in a given directory passed as the first argument (default ./):
#!/bin/bash
srchdir="${1:-.}"
for i in "$srchdir"/*; do
printf " %s\n" "$i"
done
If you must iterate below an entire subtree that includes numerous branches, then find will likely be your only choice. However, be aware that using find or ls to populate a for loop brings with it the potential for problems with embedded characters such as a \n within a filename, etc. See Why for i in $(find . -type f) # is wrong even though unavoidable at times.