Shell Programming and Scripting

First off, let me apologize if I'm posting this in the wrong place!

I am a newbie to this forum, to shell scripting and to Linux so please bare with me.

I created a script on the windows environment that makes a call to a java application and extracts a return value from the java app. It works in windows but after moving the script to Linux and converting it to Linux (dos2unix) to remove unwanted characters, I am getting syntax errors. here's the line code failing:

Code:

for /f "delims=" %%A in ('java PDFGenerator %*') do set args=%%A

basically it calls the java app and sets whatever arguments are returned to %%A. I know that shell scripting uses $ instead of % but I cannot re-write this code in Linux. I've been breaking my head trying to get it to work but basically I need all the help i can get!

THANK YOU SO MUCH IN ADVANCE!

Hello,

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The UNIX and Linux Forums

Windows CMD is nothing like UNIX sh. Windows makes do with its lack of proper looping structures and quoting by making 'for' do 99 different ad-hoc things. UNIX sh has its own 'for' nothing like Windows', proper while loops, proper do loops, and other such structures to do all the same jobs in a more comprehensible way. The closest it has to goto, is case. So, you cannot "port" this kind of code to UNIX. You just have to rewrite it.

Fortunately, that shouldn't be hard, once you tell us what the above is actually supposed to do.

Could you explain exactly what the above code is supposed to do? Run 'java pdfgenerator file1', 'java pdfgenerator file1', etc, and catch all their results? or what?

What Operating System and version are you running and which Shell are you using?
Please post the whole original Batch File and the output from the MSDOS set command from the environment where the Batch File runs (blotting anything confidential with X's).
Have you installed Java on the Linux computer?

As the others said we may need the full script to determine what you are trying to do. I believe the posted line runs java PDFGenerator and captures the last line of output in the variable args.

Under unix you would do something like this:

Code:

args=$(java PDFGenerator $@ | tail -1)

Subject seemed clear enough. BAT to SH.

It looks like

Code:

for i in $A
do
java PDFGenerator $i 
done

The delim= probably sets the delimiter for the command line.
In a batch file, the % gets escaped with a second % - why I don't know.

Corona688 I apologize for the subject text.

Basically I have a python script that calls this .sh script and passes arguments to it. These arguments show as %* after the PDFGenerator call. The .sh script has 2 lines of code only what it does in this line is, it calls the PDFGenerator java app passing the arguments that came from my python script to it. The java app returns some arguments that are set into the "args" variable. Then the 2nd line of code (which has already been tested with hardcoded values and works) calls another python script passing the "args" value to it.

here's my second line:
python PDFGenerator.py PDFGenerator 'hello world' <--- this would be my "args" variable.

What Chubler_XL posted does exactly what i want. Thank you Chubler_XL! And thank you all who replied!