UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi everybody! This is my first post. I am a student and I'm familiarizing myself with linux.

I have lots of directories each containing file called "zadaci.latex". I want to convert them to pdf's and rename them to <directory_name>.pdf.

I read alot on this forum and came up with this script:

#! /bin/bash

Code:

for file in *; do
    if [ -d $file ]; then
       latex $file/zadaci.latex
       dvipdf $file/zadaci.dvi
       mv $file/zadaci.dvi $file/$file.pdf
    fi
done

But latex command creates a file in directory where this script is and man page for latex is not very helpful.
Can somebody help with this?

And is there a solution that uses "find | xargs"?

It's not clear to me what the problem is, but you should probably change to each directory and run Latex from there. That way, the .aux file will not be overwritten (which could be important if you have to run Latex twice to resolve references and such like).
Also, I guess you really want to rename the pdf file rather than the dvi file.

Code:

for file in *; do
    if [ -d $file ]; then
        cd $file
        latex zadaci.latex
        dvipdf zadaci.dvi
        mv zadaci.pdf $file.pdf
        cd -
    fi
done

A possible solution using find is

Code:

for file in `find . -type d -maxdepth 1`; do
    cd $file
    latex zadaci.latex
    dvipdf zadaci.dvi
    mv zadaci.pdf $file.pdf
    cd -
done

Great. Thank you very much.