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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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LEARN ABOUT SUNOS

diffmk

diffmk(1)							   User Commands							 diffmk(1)

NAME

       diffmk - mark differences between versions of a troff input file

SYNOPSIS

       diffmk oldfile newfile markedfile

DESCRIPTION

       diffmk  compares  two versions of a file and creates a third version that includes "change mark" (.mc) commands for nroff(1) and  troff(1).
       oldfile and newfile are the old and new versions of the file. diffmk generates markedfile, which,  contains  the  text  from  newfile  with
       troff(1) "change mark" requests (.mc) inserted where  newfile differs from  oldfile. When markedfile is formatted, changed or inserted text
       is shown by  | at the right margin of each line. The position of deleted text is shown by a single *.

USAGE

       See largefile(5) for the description of the behavior of diffmk when encountering files greater than or equal to 2 Gbyte ( 2**31 bytes).

EXAMPLES

       Example 1: An example of the diffmk command.

       diffmk can also be used in conjunction with the proper  troff requests to produce program listings with marked changes.	In  the  following
       command line:

       example% diffmk old.c new.c marked.c ; nroff reqs marked.c | pr

       the file reqs contains the following troff requests:

       .pl 1
       .ll 77
       .nf
       .eo
       .nh

       which eliminate page breaks, adjust the line length, set no-fill mode, ignore escape characters, and turn off hyphenation, respectively.

       If the characters  | and * are inappropriate, you might run  markedfile through	sed(1) to globally change them.

ATTRIBUTES

       See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following attributes:

       +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+
       |      ATTRIBUTE TYPE	     |	    ATTRIBUTE VALUE	   |
       +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+
       |Availability		     |SUNWdoc			   |
       +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+

SEE ALSO

       diff(1), nroff(1), sed(1), troff(1), attributes(5), largefile(5)

BUGS

       Aesthetic  considerations  may  dictate	manual	adjustment of some output. File differences involving only formatting requests may produce
       undesirable output, that is, replacing .sp by .sp 2 will produce a "change mark" on the preceding or following line of output.

SunOS 5.10							    14 Sep 1992 							 diffmk(1)
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