Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi guys if i do

a=`basename -e -s /home/j/john/*`

du -k -h $a | sort -nr | head -10

why when i run the script does it work but also say usage basename string [suffix]

any ideas thanks

Hi,
What did You expect for output? I don't think basename has the options -e and -s, are You perhaps thinking of some other command?

/L

Well i took the -s sand -e and i get the same

i just want to cut the /home/j/john and print the directory names in that path

so rather then

/home/j/john/directory/
/home/j/john/directory2/pictures

it should list it

.directory
.pictures

im trying to list the 10 largest files in the users home directory but i dont want to display the whole path just the last folder

Hi again,
yes because even if You remove the -s and -e it may still be syntactically wrong, probably because the wild card * expands to more arguments than base name expects.

A few ways to get the dir names from a directory could be

Code:

ls -d /home/lakris/*/

Code:

find /home/lakris  -maxdepth 1 -type d

or even

Code:

tree -d -L 1 /home/lakris

if You have it. But perhaps not so good for scripting!
After You've got the names, You can treat hem with basename to get the basic file (dir) name You want.

An example:

ls -1 -d /home/lakris/*/|while read line; do basename $line;done

i do this and i get the expected correct result but i still get an error saying no such file or directory found

Code:

a=`ls -1 -d /home/j/jdongs/*/|while read line; do basename $line;done`

not sure why

Hi, I am not sure what that could be, can You post some output? Maybe there are dirnames with space in them? To handle that, use quotes around the variable, do basename "$line".
And will You do any operations based on the variable "a" or on the read input in the while loop? I would recommend the latter. The var "a" will contain a row of words and if a directory contains of several words You won't be able to discriminate between the words/directory names in "a". Otherwise You may have to use an array.



/Lakris

/home/j/jdongs/*/: No such file or directory

The 10 biggest directories are:
size Directory
960 k ./dir1
928 k ./.tin
808 k ./files

it just prints 10 of the biggest directories but for some reason does it correcty but comes up wth No such file or directory