How to stop unix read command escape backslashes

If you want to pipe any output that has backslashes in it (or make 'read' take a string with backslashes) to the read command then you will need to stop the read command treating backslash as escape character by using read -r
e.g.

cleartool ls | while read -r file
do
  # do something to file
done

How to do mass renaming of file extension

Problem:
You want to rename all the .wiki files to be .textile instead.

Solution:
\ls -1 *.wiki | while read f; do mv $f ${f%.wiki}.textile; done