for with list
Traditional version of for from the Bourne shell.

For each element in given list until end of list, 
  Assign an element from list to variable specified. 
  Do 
    Action body sequence of commands.
    Variable referenced in normal way with $.
    Referencing element variable not a requirement
  done

for var in le1 le2 le3 etc.
do
   action on $var 
   other actions
done



for - keyword.

var - variable name, one word variable name, standard rules.  
                 Do not use $ here.
                 for assigns values from the list.

in - keyword preceding list of strings to process.
 
 le1 le2 le3, etc. - a word list of values to assign to variable.

  List is the interesting part of this.

actual space delimited list of strings

  one two "and a tree"  

  This is a 3 element list.
  Each time through the loop the next word is assigned.
  Quoted strings are a single element.

lists can be generated as the result of a command.
  Use graves or $() to run command to generate list.

# This will list files in current directory as the input list for
#   the for statement
# Then, for each file
#   it will do a long listing
#   followed by applying the file command
#
for fn in $( ls )
do
  # do long listing, toss any errors.
  ls -l $fn 2> /dev/null

  # do file on file.
  file $fn

  echo " "
done | less


Working with strings with embedded spaces, e.g "Hi there", when passed
as arguments. 

#!/bin/bash

forfun()
{
  # quotes stripped from command line arguments.
  echo 'for a in $*'
  for a in $*
  do
    echo $a
  done
  echo " "

  # all cmd line arguments quoted as single string.
  echo 'for a in "$*"'
  for a in "$*"
  do
    echo $a
  done
  echo " "

  # quotes stripped from command line arguments.
  echo 'for a in $@'
  for a in $@
  do
    echo $a
  done
  echo " "

  # cmd line argument quotes honored.
  echo 'for a in "$@"'
  for a in "$@"
  do
    echo $a
  done
  echo " "

  #abbreviated version of quoted $@
  echo 'for a'
  for a
  do
    echo $a
  done
}

forfun one "and two"


Using modified internal field separator, IFS, to change the separator 
use to parse a list.

#!/bin/bash

OIFS="$IFS"
IFS=:
cnt=1

for e in `cat /etc/passwd`
do
  echo $e
done
IFS="$OIFS"