I think you're confused. I just tried this in a few shells. It works in Bash on Cygwin and OS X. touch "file with spaces" for f in *; do if [[ -f $f ]

I think you're confused. I just tried this in a few shells. It works in Bash on Cygwin and OS X. touch "file with spaces" for f in *; do if [[ -f $f ]]; then echo file: $f; fi; done; This echoes one line for "file with spaces".