Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi. This is my first post on the forums.

I am trying to write a script that will parse a folder of files "oneverylongfilenamexyz.pdf" and create a .dat file named "oneverylongfilenamexyz.dat" with the first line of each .dat file saying variable="xyz" where xyz is the last 14 characters of $i before the extension.

My syntax is very poor but I think the logic should be something like

# first loop to make dat files
for i in `ls -R dat_tmp/ | grep .pdf`
touch $i.dat
# second loop to fill dat files
for i in `ls -l | grep .dat`
echo 'variable=`sed[last 14 characters] $i`' > $i.dat


Any help is much appreciated. Thank you.

I have few doubts if you want .pdf files thaen why you used grep -v??
and ls -l won't give only filename..
to take last 14 char of filename(I think thats what you meant)
use this in you second for loop

Code:

basename $i .dat |cut -c 14-

Yes, I realized my error and changed it.

Thanks for the suggestion. Basename I believe will work.

this will also do

Code:

echo "oneverylongfilenamexyz.dat"|awk -F"." '{print substr($1,length($1)-14)}'

Finished script. Thanks for the help!

Code:

# first loop to make dat files
for i in `ls -R $dattmp | grep .pdf`
do
touch $dattmp/`basename $i .pdf`.dat
done
# second loop to fill dat files
for i in `ls $dattmp/ | grep .dat`
do
echo trans_num=`basename $i .dat | cut -c 7-20` > $dattmp/`basename $i .dat`.dat
done
mv $dattmp/* $blade6path/