Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi Everyone!

I'm quite new to shell scripting so this might be trivial, though 3 days of struggle and search didn't help to solve the problem:

I want to look for files called '*HUN*' in a huge amount of directories most of their names contain whitespaces and print the path of the directory if it contains such a file.

example:
/home/usr/test/f 3/

so I try to use:

Code:

[ -e  "/home/usr/test/f 3/*HUN*" ] && echo y || echo n

it returns "n", though there is a file called "f_HUN.avi" in the directory.
the funny thing is, the directory is recognised with the -d option, i.e.

Code:

[ -d  "/home/usr/test/f 3" ] && echo y || echo n

returns "y".
Is there a way to overcome this issue with the space for the -e or -f options?

Any help would be much appreciated!

s

hello

Code:

find /dir -type f -iname '*HUN*'

@OP: By using quotes you are preventing glob expansion so you are testing for a file called *HUN* . And without the quotes it would only work if the asterisks expand to exactly one file. If there are more files, then the test expression will become invalid.

Thanks for the quick replies!

@gaurav1086: it works in deed, but I thought there must be a way to get it working with "test"
Actually I want to have a list with all the directories containing movies without Hungarian subtitles in them. So I have a list of directories and want to check them.
The problem with find is that it will give me a lot of double records, as there are many files in the directories.

Here's the little script I want to use (it seems working now, I must have been changing something):

Code:

#!/bin/bash
 
find $(pwd)/* -type d | while read dir ; do
[ -f "$dir"/*HUN* ] && echo "found in: $dir" || echo "not found in: $dir"
done

---------- Post updated at 09:22 AM ---------- Previous update was at 09:21 AM ----------

@Scrutinizer: thanks for your comment, it explains why it was not working and why the script above seemed to be working but actually giving error messages if found more than 1 file in the dir. Is it possible to fix this with regex? I mean something like this:

Code:

[ -f "$dir"/.*HUN.* ]

with or without quotes, donno...

You could e.g. use:

Code:

find $(pwd)/* -type d | while read dir
do
  for file in "$dir"/*HUN*
  do 
    if [ -f "$file" ] 
    then
      echo "found in: $dir" 
      break
    else
      echo "not found in: $dir" 
    fi
  done
done

Thanks Scrutinizer!

This works. So basically break exits the loop after the first file matching the criteria is found. Is it right? I just want to be sure I understand correctly what the script's doing.

Hi, it breaks the inner loop, correct.