Shell Programming and Scripting

I need one xml for all pdfs in and under specified directory.
For description tags I need pdf name, and folder name for two levels up. Info should be sorted by date, showing newest first, and links to files.

Your script is creating 3 XML tags per PDF file in the rss_body function:Should there be a </link> tag after the data you insert following the <link> tag?

Please show an explicit example of the data that you want created for the following PDF file:

Code:

-rw-r--r--  1 dwc  staff  2895323 Oct 23  2013 /var/www/html/Intranet/pdf/IEEE/20601-Rev-D7r02-clean.pdf

Your current code is creating one XML file for each different final directory name in the PDF pathnames found. One of these XML files is created for each PDF file found. If another PDF file with the same final directory name is found, it overwrites the previous XML file. (This is just slow if there is only one directory under $SYSDIR with that name. If there are two or more directories with the same final component name, there could be several problems.)

Furthermore, if there are more PDF files than xargs will process in a single invocation of ls your files will NOT be sorted from newest to oldest; there will be groups of PDF files sorted in timestamp order, but the complete list might not be correctly ordered. So, to get a time ordered list of files we either need to gather data needed for each file into single lines in a file that we can sort by timestamp, or we need to create files in a single directory with the same timestamps as your PDF files that we can then sort us ls -t. Creating a single file will probably be faster if you have an easy way to convert file timestamps into text. If not, we can use touch to copy file timestamps to other files.

Does your system have a stat utility?

Output from commands:

Code:

ls -l feedgen.sh
 -rwxr-x--- 1 root root 1529 Feb 27 14:27 feedgen.sh

find $SYSDIR -type f -name '*.pdf' -exec ls -l {} +
no output

> find $RSSDIR -type d -exec ls -ld {} + drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Feb 27 14:12 .

> find $RSSDIR -type f -name '*.xml' -exec ls -l {} +
no output 

I have STAT utility, I think. Does code work on your system? On my system there is no output after running the code at all, still.

The > at the start of next to the last two command lines you typed is a secondary prompt indicating that you probably mistyped or omitted a quote in the first find command. Hit the control (or cntl or ctl depending on who made your keyboard) key and the c key at the same time to generate an interrupt signal to get back to your primary prompt. And, then, copy the find command I requested and paste it into your shell.

And, for the third time, what operating system are you using?

I copied your commands to Webmin command shell, when I tried it, no mistype I think. OS is Ubuntu Server 14.04.

I'm sorry. I completely misunderstood your problem. I thought you wanted help with a bash shell script. Now it appears that you are unable to run simple bash shell commands on the system where you want to run that bash shell script with the environment variables set as they are used in that script.

If you look back through this thread, you'll see that I have asked several questions that you still have not answered. Without answers to those questions (and a real sample of the desired output based on at least two PDF files from different direcctories), I can't figure out what needs to be done to satisfy your requirements.

It is OK, no harm done. We are in miscommunication from start. Bash scripting is not my thing, so I will try another solution for this problem, without bash. Thanks again.