Shell Programming and Scripting

Because he needs the size field as well
Else he could simply run ls *.edf

... that and:

Code:

-rw-rw-rw-   1 user group      407 Oct 14  2009 foo   bar
-rw-rw-rw-   1 user group      407 Oct 14  2009 foo:ba .txt

Thanks Vgersh. Your solution worked fine. Many thanks to all who gave wonderful responses. But I needed file size and name and hence vgresh solution worked for me.

---------- Post updated at 02:32 PM ---------- Previous update was at 02:28 PM ----------

vgersh,

Can you please explain the script?

On behalf of vgersh99. The "while read -r" statement reads each matching line from the "ls -l *\.edf" statement in turn. It places the results into environment variables called $a, $s, $n . $a is a variable to use unwanted fields, $s is the file size, $n is the file name. The clever bit of the script is that $n contains the whole filename whether or not it contains spaces or special characters. This is because the last field in a "read" statement is filled with any remaining characters from the input line. See "man read".
The square brackets in the output echo are not special syntax, they just help to show where each field starts and stops when testing the script.

Note the backslash in "ls -l *\.edf". This is good practice because unix is not MSDOS and a fullstop in a filename is just another character but it can have special meaning in a regular expression (which this isn't).

if you have du

du -s *.edf

@trey85stang
The file sizes output from "du -s" are quite different from "ls -la", but they are the same as those from "ls -las".
The file sizes from "du -s" and "ls -las" are in units of disc blocks and reflect the actual space taken by the files. A disc block is usually 512 bytes ... but it depends on the system.
The output from "ls -l" is how much data there is in each file up to the EOF marker. The EOF marker may be part-way through a disc block.

On one of my systems a single byte text file takes 8,192 bytes of disc space.