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Full Discussion: Remove spaces between file names
Top Forums Shell Programming and Scripting Remove spaces between file names Post 302301925 by bakunin on Sunday 29th of March 2009 09:08:40 AM
Old 03-29-2009
The problem with your code is that the shell uses whitespace to delimit words.

Suppose you have a file named "two words", and you write a command like "cp two words" - how is the shell supposed to know wether you want the file "two" copied to "words" or if you are talking about the file "two words" and the second argument is missing?

The same is true for the for-loop, which passes one argument at a time to the content of the loop - and "one argument" is "one word", because this is where the stream the for-loop works on was split at.

So, here is a script which relies on exactly this mechanism:

Code:
#!/usr/bin/ksh

typeset oldfile=""
typeset newfile=""

# the grep filters for filenames with spaces only:
ls -1 | grep "[^ ] [^ ]" | while read oldfile ; do
     newfile="$( print - $oldfile | tr -d ' ')"
     print - "mv \"${oldfile}\" \"${newfile}\"" # just display, next line is working
     # mv "$oldfile" "$newfile"
done

By the way: do not use for-loops to process lists of unknown length, like a directory listing. If the list grows too long it will exceed your maximum line length (see syslimits.h) and your code will break. Using a while-loop removes this risk.

I hope this helps.

bakunin
 

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aha(1)								 Ansi HTML Adapter							    aha(1)

NAME

	aha - Ansi HTML Adapter

SYNOPSIS

       aha [options] [-f datei]

DESCRIPTION

       aha takes SGR-colored Input and prints W3C conform HTML-Code.
       aha reads the Input from a file or stdin and writes HTML-Code to stdout.

OPTIONS

       --help , -h , -?
	      A help like this

       --black , -b
	      Black Background and white "standard color"

       --pink , -p
	      Pink Background

       --iso X , -i X
	      Uses ISO 8859-X instead of utf-8. X must be 1..16

       --title X , -t X
	      Gives the html output the title

       --line-fix , -l
	      Uses a fix for inputs using control sequences to change the cursor position like htop. It's a hot fix, it may not work with any pro-
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EXAMPLE

       aha --help | aha --black --title "the awesome aha help"> aha-help.htm
	      Creates an HTML file with the help of aha with black background

       colordiff oldfile.c newfile.c | aha > colordiff.htm
	      Creates an HTML file with a colorful diff-output of two files "oldfile.c" and "newfile.c" with white background

       ls --color=always | aha --pink > ls.htm
	      Creates an HTML file with a colorful ls-output with pink background.

       echo a | htop | aha --black --line-fix > htop.htm
	      Creates an HTML file with the output of htop. You have to use --line-fix due the other new-line-commands htop uses.

AUTHOR

       Copyleft Alexander Matthes aka Ziz 2011
       zizsdl@googlemail.com

SEE ALSO

       http://ziz.delphigl.com/tool_aha.php

								  August 31, 2011							    aha(1)
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