Basic Unix Shell Scripting Question

[Al6200]

Okay, so I just started doing Unix shell scripting (with Bash).

Let's say I'm in the terminal and I type the command ls. I'll get something like:

myFile1
myFile2
myFile3

The files are printed vertically, with each on its own line.

But if I'm in my shell script and I have the command echo `ls` what I get is:

myFile1 myFile2 myFile3

The files are printed horizontally and wrap onto new lines.

Without writing some weird custom code that replaces spaces with newlines or something along those lines, is there a way to call commands in a shell script and display the result vertically?

Thanks.

[kiwi-kiwi]

ls -l to output the files vertically, then use cut or awk to get the first column

[Al6200]

Thanks, but the actual command I'm working with is grep. For grep -l means to just list the filenames. I just mentioned ls because it has the same problem.

[kiwi-kiwi]

grep -l | sed -e 's/ /\n/' ?

[Al6200]

Your logic is right but for some reason pipes don't seem to work inside shell scripts. Even less doesn't work.

My code stores $result as the grep string and then calls,

result="$result | sed s/' '/'\n'/"

echo `$result`

grep . * | sed s/' '/'\n'/ works fine in the console, but when I call it in the shell script it complains with "|, no such file or directory. sed no such file or directory, ..."

For some reason it doesn't recognize the pipe.