Bashscripts.org

Hello fellow Bashers. I am new to scripting, but am eager to learn.

I have the following code:



This just (for testing purposes now) echos the file listing in the current directory.

The first problem I have is that the echo in the do while loop works fine, but the last line echos a blank line. What am I missing?

My second issue is how do I modify the text in each array? I was trying to use: but to no avail.

First of all we can start with modifying text in the variable.

Easiest way is to put in that way obviously. This never works as planned thou so you can use execution in variables to solve it.


The other part I'm not really sure why it shouldn't work.
But if you really want to do that I'd suggest something like this


Instead of ls you can also use absolute paths, /home/sajko/* will work the same as doing ls /home/sajko.
Also why I add --color=no is because color coded output will screw with the result in the for loop, it happens to me way to often (even thou no one else seems to have seen it before).

Hope this gives you some clues

Best regards
Fredrik Eriksson

weird things happen with bash shells when you use a construct like so;


I can't say I can fully explain it but basically do not use that type of structure if you can avoid it.
The 'for' loop the Fredrik suggests is safer

Well actually it isn't... Wierd things happens when whitespace gets involved in for loops .
A file listing like this

would make a for loop go abit crazy.

This can be remedied by not using long listing. In which case it would look like this


This would present another issue thou. Since there's a space in the file name this would make itterations look like this

where neither 1.php or tmp exists (or even worse, they do exist).

The solution to this problem is the IFS environment variable.

Will change the itteration separator to a new line instead of any whitespace character (newline, space or tab) making it usable when a space character is in the file name, or when you parse columned files.

There are several other things that gets abit wacky but you'll figure them out while you get along with your bash programming.
Recommended thou is that you learn to handle the bash commands for stream editing, programs like sed, cut, awk, replace, tr and so on

ps. Using the absolute path (as described in my previous post) instead of running a command to populate your for loop condition does not present the above problem. The shell automagically escapes characters that could pose a problem as part of the expanding of the *. Also you'll get the full path and then file name which ls won't give you. You can use "basename" to remove the absolute path ds.

Best regards
Fredrik Eriksson

Wow, thanks guys for your help. I am unable to apply this today, hopefully tomorrow.