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Full Discussion: How do I pass a wild card as an argument
Top Forums UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers How do I pass a wild card as an argument Post 302112505 by awk on Wednesday 28th of March 2007 01:33:27 PM
Old 03-28-2007
Quote:
Originally Posted by eja
Hi,

I would like to pass a wild card as part of an argument. But when I do it the script views the wild card as text.
Example:
sFile=MG1A*
sort $sFile > $sFile.sorted

What I get is MG1A*.sorted

The problem is I am passed a series of files where the first few characters like "MG1A" are constant. The additional part of the file name is a date time stamp. I will never know the exact date time stamp. I need to do a search for MG1A* which will find me one file. How can I write my script so the variable $sFile will know that the "*" in MG1A* is a wild card not text?

I know I can write code to run "ls" on a directory and get all file names then write a loop or do statement to do my sort based upon that list regardless of the file name. But I have more files in the dir than I want to grab. I also know I can run the "ls" command output the file names in the dir to a file and grep for the part fo the file names I am looking for. I also think this can be done if I pput the whole comamnd iBut current design restricts me form going that path. It would require a whole re-write and I am trying to avoid that.

Thank you.
try changing (ksh)
sFile='MG1A*'
sort $sFile > $sFile.sorted

Be sure and use single quotes - it will not expand out the wildcard at the assignment line.
 

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LEARN ABOUT HPUX

readahead

readahead(8)                                                  System Manager's Manual                                                 readahead(8)

NAME

       readahead - file preloader for boot process optimization

SYNOPSIS

       readahead [options] <file-list> [another-file-list [...]]

DESCRIPTION

       readahead is a files preloader designed to optimize the disk I/O during the boot process.

OPTIONS

       -b, --build
              build optimised files list only, without sorting.

       -s, --sort
              build and sort list of files only (implies -b).

       -o, --output <file>
              write sorted list of files to file.

       -d, --dont-sort
              preload files described by an already sorted files list.

       -h, --help
              print the usage information.

       -v, --verbose
              enable the verbose mode.

       -t, --timing
              report time spent on each operation.

       -m, --maxsize <max size>
              maximum size in KiB a file can be in order to be preloaded, default is 10240.

       <file-list> [another-file-list [...]]
              One or more files containing the list of files to be preloaded or sorted. The files list can be generated by readahead-collector(8).

FILES

       /etc/default/readahead-fedora

SEE ALSO

       readahead-collector(8), readahead(2),

AUTHORS

       Arjan van de Ven <arjan@infradead.org>,
              Ziga Mahkovec <ziga.mahkovec@klika.si>, Karel Zak <kzak@redhat.com>,

       This manual page was written by Raphael Geissert <geissert@debian.org>

                                                                     July 2011                                                        readahead(8)
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