Bashscripts.org

hello everyone. i am writing a function, which renames desired files. first pattern matching part of the file from the end (mostly because of extensions). i am almost done, but one thing annoys me:

i am getting the list of files through find and then reading the list with while read, so i can avoid troubles with whitespaces in the name of files. the thing is, i need to count, how many of the files was actually renamed, but i can't get it once the while ends...

the important part of the code goes like this:
(imagine 1 file matching the pattern)


so my question is: is there any way how to get that information out of the subshell? or is there some other way how to read a file (variable) line by line, which doesn't involve using a subshell?

One of the weirdnesses about bash is the way it does those subshells lol
Two ways I know to get the info out of the loop is to either use a temp file to store the data or output the data and catch it in the external shell like so...



Something like that anyway

DW

You could also use the export command. And just "import" it outside the function.



Thou I prefer to use echo and exec my function within a variable.

thanks guys! that thing with

is exactly what i was looking for!

however i wonder what would the awk part look like if i needed to get more than 1 variable out of the loop. like when i want to use:


the export command didn't work for me, because it looks it's required for it to be the last command in a function or so, but i may use it in some other function probably, so thanks anyway...

I'm guessing you're trying to figure out how many files are in a path?



if you need to do stuff, make a function.


This will return $stuff and $lines seperated by a space... ofc you can change that to something that might be more manageable, like colon or something.
If bash supported the return of arrays that would have been a prefered choice. But if you want to do that kinda stuff you'll need to run something like perl or php.

What you can do thou with arrays (not fully tested thou) is to use them as global variables.
http://www.unix.com/shell-programming-s ... array.html <-- this link explains the details.

Best regards
Fredrik Eriksson

it's not really, what i was trying to figure out. as i said it's a file renaming function, so first i have to find all the files matching $pattern (e.g. all filest starting with foo*), then rename only those, which have a part of the filename matching $match (e.g. all with .bar extension) and rename the $match part to $replacement. i need to know how many of the files was actually renamed...

but the thing with find ... | wc -l is very useful, when there are no files matching $pattern. i was getting the annoying error message: find: something: no such file or directory, so i used this:

anyway, my function is done now, big thanks to you guys...

and the second part is just what i was asking: how to make a function returning more than 1 variable. so thanks for making this clear to me, fredrik