Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi all,

I have 4 files for example named

abc01012009.txt
abc02012009.txt
abc03012009.txt
abc04012009.txt

in a folder. I would like to firstly backup the latest file available, in this case, the latest date available, abc04012009.txt to its subfolder named backup, and then rename the file to abc.txt, so that leaves me with

abc01012009.txt
abc02012009.txt
abc03012009.txt
abc.txt

then, it will run the commands I will set, and once the commands are completed, it go through the list of files again, and loop my commands, until no more files named abcDDMMYYYY.txt are available.Can someone please help, thank you so much!.

rgds

you mean this?

Code:

while : ; do
ls -1rt abc[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9].txt > /dev/null
if [ $? -eq 0 ] ;then
lastfile=`ls -1rt abc[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9].txt|tail -1`
cp $lastfile backup/
mv $lastfile abc.txt
run your set of commands here
else
exit
fi
done

yes thanks it worked!.

except when there are no more files left that matches the pattern, I get this error :P

abc[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9].txt: No such file or directory

.

please advise

The fist "ls" is used to test if any files matching this criteria are found. The output of ls is "thrown away" (to /dev/null) - the point being to know if there are such files, not to list them. If files are found, the "if [ $? -eq 0 ]" will be true (the ls returned 0 meaning success - files were found). But ls will write to standard error if no files are found. You can get rid of the error by directing standard error to /dev/null too. The simplest way is to direct standard error to standard output (which you threw away to /dev/null), so...

Change:

Code:

ls -1rt abc[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9].txt > /dev/null

To:

Code:

ls -1rt abc[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9].txt > /dev/null 2>&1

I hope this was explanatory and not at all boring to read!

Thank you very much!. Really appreciate it!