Iterating over each line of ls -l output

Set IFS to newline, like this:

IFS='
'
for x in `ls -l $1`; do echo $x; done

Put a sub-shell around it if you don’t want to set IFS permanently:

(IFS='
'
for x in `ls -l $1`; do echo $x; done)

Or use while | read instead:

ls -l $1 | while read x; do echo $x; done

One more option, which runs the while/read at the same shell level:

while read x; do echo $x; done << EOF
$(ls -l $1)
EOF