Hello,

Just to set the tone: I am a complete UNIX noob (i guess you see that excuse popping up frequently here but anyhow)
Now here's my bloody simple problem which needs to be quite urgently resolved: I have a number of files in a directory, for which the ones, relevant for executing a subsequent action, can be easily gathered using an ls -1 | cut -c1-5 command. What I want to do know is plug in each filename resulting out of this ls command into another command. Hence, I need to temporarily store each name into a variable, execute the other command by using that variable and then move on to the next one untill the list is finished.

PS: if someone knows a fool proof unix guide on the web which enables even an amoebe to learn unix, feel free to post the link.

Thanks.

for i in `ls`; do echo $i;done

-ilan

This comes close but not yet perfect. Now "i" is filled with just the regular filename, but I need to have that string made shorter with the cut command.

for i in `ls | cut -c1-5 `; do echo $i; done