Shell Programming and Scripting

The problem with these is: The sh files are put inside the new sh file without order...


Is there no way to have a newline between each of them ?

try this

Code:

cat *.sh | while read f
 do
echo "$f\n" >> final.sh
done

What do you mean "put inside the new sh file without order"? The input files are put into your output file in alphabetic order.

Unless your existing .sh files do not end with a newline character, there is also a newline between the input files in your output file. Do you mean that you want an empty line to be added after each input file as it is copied into the new file, an empty line to be added before each input file as it is copied into the new file, an empty line to be added between input files as they are copied into the new file, or something else?

Do yoo understand that a shell executing your new file will ignore empty lines in your input file (unless there are mismatched quotes or incomplete here-dociments inside one or more of the input files)? Adding empty lines means you will have to use something in addition to or instead of cat to produce your output file? Can you explain WHY you need to do this?

The problem is that they are put in like this:

Code:

SH1
SH2 SH3
SH4 SH5 SH6...

Newlines are missing between several of them, in turn will stop my commands to work.

The commands are simple:
"mv XXXXX YYYYY" style. when the commands are lined up beside each other that will not work like it should.

Correct Form:

Code:

SH1
SH2
SH3
SH4...

@zozoo: That code you posted will actually ADD /n into my final script file... resulting in that not working.

Hi pasc,
In your first post in this thread, you said:
but that was a lie if you're getting the output:

Code:

SH1
SH2 SH3
SH4 SH5 SH6...

To get that output the files that contained SH2, SH4, and SH5 did not contain a line of text. By definition, a line contains a terminating newline character which is not present in those three files. Assuming that each of your input files contains exactly one line or exactly one partial line (missing a newline), try the following:
First, save the following in a file named cat1line

Code:

#!/bin/ksh
if [ $# -lt 2 ]
then    printf "Usage: %s output_file input_file...\n" "${0##*/}" >&2
        exit 1
fi
of="$1"
shift
> "$of"
while [ $# -gt 0 ]
do      (cat $1;echo)| {
                IFS="" read -r line
                printf "%s\n" "$line" >> "$of"
        }
        shift
done

Second, make it executable:

Code:

chmod +x cat1line

Third, run it:

Code:

./cat1line output_pathname *.sh

Actually scratch everything I said...

the problem was:

the lines contained a " " tab.
This messed up my programs parsing and made it "seem" like there were no newlines.... all in all viewing it on pc revealed that the first given cat approach definitly works fine:

Code:

cat *.sh > /var/mobile/backup.sh

By a lie, I mean you said each file contained a line of text. By definition, a line is terminated by a <newline> character. The output you displayed shows that half of the first six input files did not contain a line.

The script I gave you should work even though some of the files didn't contain a line. It won't work if one or more of the input files contain any characters after a <newline> character that you want to appear in the output file.

---------- Post updated at 04:43 ---------- Previous update was at 04:34 ----------

Containing a tab character doesn't account for the output you showed us in message #11 in this thread. Only the lack of a <newline> character accounts for the output you showed us in that message.