Quote:

Originally Posted by earls Hi, I have a strange problem and I'm sure its because I'm doing something stupid. When I loop through all of the files in a directory they cannot be found. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

When you post code, please wrap it in [code] tags.

And please do not change the size of the type; you made it too small to be readable. Not to mention adding dozens of tags that had to be removed before I could edit the post.

 
$ touch a.txt
$ touch b.txt
$ ls
a.txt b.txt
$ for f in `ls` ; do echo file $f; done

The is not the way to loop through a list of files. Not only is ls unnecessary, but it will break the script if any filenames contain spaces or special characters.

Code:

for f in *;  do echo file "$f"; done

file a.txt
file b.txt
file
$ for f in `ls` ; do file $f; done

Code:

for f in * ; do file "$f"; done

a.txt: ERROR: cannot open `a.txt' (No such file or directory)
b.txt: ERROR: cannot open `b.txt' (No such file or directory)
: ERROR: cannot open `' (No such file or directory)
$ file a.txt
a.txt: empty
$

Note, however, that you don't need the loop in either case

Code:

printf "%s\n" *

file *