But can you believe people actually have file/directory names of Windows paths?! And URL's and even ones with line breaks built-in! Special characters and spaces galore... amazing!
In the end, I had to set/reset the IFS variable and multiple sed substitution to bring most of them in line. But not all! I'm bored of it now, so I'll send the few offending names to their respective users to fix themselves.
Code:
#!/bin/sh
SAVEIFS=$IFS
IFS=$(echo -en "\n\b")
find /home -gid 200 \( -type f -o -type d -o -type l \) | sed -e 's/\\/\\\\/g;s/:/\\:/g;s/ /\\ /g;s/\n//g' |
while IFS= read -r i; do
chgrp -vh `ls -lnd "${i}" | awk '{print $3}'` "${i}"
# ls -lnd "${i}"
done
IFS=$SAVEIFS
Messy
Everything that you're doing with sed is utterly pointless and the IFS gymnastics only effect is to preserve leading and trailing spaces and tabs in filenames. If you remove everything that I've highlighted in bolded red and add what I've bolded in blue, the result is identical.
IFS does not affect data flowing through a pipe, so it will not have any effect on what's sent between find and sed. It can affect the result of the read command, but only when there are multiple variables being read to or when there is leading or trailing IFS whitespace. In this case, you are not using multiple variables and there is no leading IFS whitespace because \b is not whitespace and \n cannot possibly be seen during read's field splitting step because it's used as the delimiter. Since "${i}", is quoted, the resulting filename will not undergo field splitting, so, again, the value of IFS is irrelevant. Finally, the command substition (ls | awk) which is unquoted does undergo field splitting, but since the result of that pipeline is always a series of digits, the value of IFS (\b\n) will not alter the result.
With regard to sed, every single backslash inserted by sed will be immediately removed by read. With -r, you can instruct read to not treat backslashes specially.
sed's s/\n//g will never, ever match. sed strips the newline as part of reading the line (replacing it upon output). The only way that there will ever be a newline in the text that sed's working with is if you insert it or use one of the sed commands which append (neither of which occurs here).
The code I suggested in my previous post can handle any filename so long as it does not contain a newline. Spaces? No problem. Tabs? No problem. backlashes? No problem. Colons? No problem. But newlines, nope. Why not? Because find | read is consuming newlines as delimiters.
Should you need to also handle newlines in filenames, with GNU tools, the following uses the null byte as delimiter (which is an illegal character in both UNIX and Windows pathnames), so it can handle anything:
Code:
find /dump -gid 200 \( -type f -o -type d -o -type l \) -printf '%U\0%p\0' | xargs -0n2 chgrp -vh
How would I delete white spaces in a specified file?
Also, I'd like to know what command I would use to take something off a regular expression, and put it onto another.
ie.
.
.
.
expression1 <take_off>
.
.
.
expression2 (put here)
.
.
.
Any help would be great, thanks! (10 Replies)
hi all...
i have the next question:
i have a flat file with a lot of records (lines). Each record has 10 fields, which are separated by pipe (|). My problem is what sometimes, in the first record, there are white spaces (no values, nothing) in the beginning of the record, like this:
ws ws... (2 Replies)
I have a variable that calls in a string from txt file. Problem is the string comes with an abundance of white spaces trailing it. Is there any easy way to trim the tailing white spaces off at the end? Thanks in advance. (9 Replies)
Hi,
Can anybody suggest me how to combine two strings with two or more white spaces and assign it to a variable?
E.g.
first=HAI
second=HELLO
third="$first $second" # appending strings with more than one white spaces
echo $third
this would print
HAI HELLO
Output appears... (2 Replies)
Hi,
What's the best way to find all files under a directory - including ones with space - in order to apply a command to each of them. For instance I want get a list of files under a directory and generate a checksum for each file.
Here's the csh script:
#!/bin/csh
set files = `find $1... (5 Replies)
Hello dear community!
I've recently written a BASH function for auto completion of options. It works like following: if a user types a command and then an argument to this command which starts with "^-" and then presses TAB, then 'user_command --help (or -h)' is invoked and possible options are... (0 Replies)
Hello, I'm a computer science major and I'm having problems dealing with file names with spaces in them. Particularly I'm saving a file name in a variable and then using the variable in a compare function i.e.
a='te xt.txt'
b='file2.txt'
cmp $a $b
If anyone could help me with this particular... (10 Replies)
Hi,
I am having problem in deleting the leading spaces:-
cat x.csv
baseball,NULL,8798765,Most played
baseball,NULL,8928192,Most played
baseball,NULL,5678945,Most played
cricket,NOTNULL,125782,Usually played
cricket,NOTNULL,678921,Usually played
$ nawk 'BEGIN{FS=","}!a... (2 Replies)
Hello!
I have one problem with my bash script - I would like to be able to read white space characters from stdin (for example single " ") - can I acomplish that somehow? I need to read only one character at the time, so I use read -s -n 1 var but it doesn't work for whitespaces apparently.
... (3 Replies)
The following command to replace text in place in multiple files in a directory is tripping up on filename spaces (Windows environment). I really don't know Perl.
find '\\server\directory' | xargs perl -pi -e 's/textA/textB/g'Mike (2 Replies)
03-17-2013
