Usually when working with filenames we need to terminate each result record uniquely using the special null-character. That’s because filenames may contain special symbols, including white-space and even the newline character “\n”.

There is already a great answer how to do this in the StackOverflow topic “Capturing output of find . -print0 into a bash array”. The proposed solution doesn’t invoke any sub-shells, which is great, and also explains all caveats in detail. In order to become really universal, this solution must not rely on the static file-descriptor “3”. Another great answer at SO gives an example on how to dynamically use the next available file-descriptor.

Here is the solution which works without using sub-shells and without depending on a static FD:

a=()
while IFS='' read -r -u"$FD" -d $'\0' file; do
  # note that $IFS is having the default value here
  a+=("$file") # or however you want to process each file
done {FD}< <(find /tmp -type f -print0)
exec {FD}<&- # close the file descriptor

# the result is available outside the loop, too
echo "${a[0]}" # 1st file
echo "${a[1]}" # 2nd file