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For loop find statement file name manipulation

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#3 (permalink)

07-03-2009

cfajohnson cfajohnson is offline

Shell programmer, author

Join Date: Mar 2007

Location: Toronto, Canada

Posts: 2,372

Quote:

Originally Posted by cbo0485

(Code reformatted for legibility)

Quote:

Code:

for i in `find . -name "*.BEFORE_DISASTER_RECOVERY"`

That will fail if any filenames contain spaces. Pipe the output of find into a loop:

Code:
find . -name "*.BEFORE_DISASTER_RECOVERY" |
while read file
do
  : do whatever
done

(And your script will be more legible if you use a meaningful variable name for the loop.)

Quote:

Code:

do
  dir_name=`dirname $i`
  file_name=`basename $i`

There is no need for either external command, dirname or basename. The Unix shell can do it internally:

Code:
dir_name=${file%/*}
file_name=${file##*/}

Quote:

Code:

  cd $dir_name
  mv $file_name # (STUCK HERE)

Both the cd and mv will fail if $dir_name contains spaces. Quote variable references:

Code:
  cd "$dir_name"
  mv "$file_name"

Quote:

Code:

  pwd
  cd $BASE_DIR
done

Okay, so I was able to get to this point. As you can see, I have a small for loop that searches for any files with the string BEFORE_DISASTER_RECOVERY in the file name, it then sets two variables dir_name and file_name, cd's to the dir_name directory, and then this is where I'm stuck. I need to mv $file_name to $filename minus ".BEFORE_DISASTER_RECOVERY.

I'm sure it's something simple, but this is where I'm currently stuck.

All you need is:

Code:

find . -name "*.BEFORE_DISASTER_RECOVERY" |
while read file
do
  mv "$file" "$file%.BEFORE_DISASTER_RECOVERY}"
done