Shell Programming and Scripting

Hello everyone,
I'm new to UNIX and thought I'd give writing my own script a try, but the * is giving me some trouble. What I'm trying to do is write a script that does the same thing as rm, but instead of actually deleting the file, it merely moves it to the trash. This is what I have so far:

Code:

#!/bin/sh

garbage="$1"

for file in "$garbage"
do
     mv "$file"/ ~/.Trash/
done

The script works as long as the user inputs a single file name as a variable, but I wanted to make it work for * also (ie 'command *' would move everything to the trash). It seems that if I use * as a variable the script just takes the first file that meets the criteria and uses that file as $1. Surely there's a way to get $garbage to literally mean * and not the name of the first file found?

Hi.

You have set garbage to $1 - the first file.

You can change that line to:

Code:

garbage="$@"

to mean "all files", but that only works so long as your filenames don't have spaces in them.

The below will work for files with spaces too:

Code:

#!/bin/sh

for file in "$@"
do
  mv "$file" ~/.Trash
done

Thanks! Worked perfectly. I knew there had to be some built in way to do this.
Thanks again.

---------- Post updated at 08:50 PM ---------- Previous update was at 05:19 PM ----------

OK now something else is happening I don't get. When I run the command it only works for directories, otherwise I get an error message. I thought the "$@" was supposed to include all possible arguments?

"$@" represents all the arguments.

If you called the script with * as the argument, the shell will expand it and the script will see all the files (including subdirectories) in the current directory (not including dot files), each stored as a separate argument in "$@".

Ah, I see what's going on. Thanks for the replies. Apparently

Code:

#!/bin/sh

for file in "$@"
do
	mv "$file" ~/.Trash/
done

works fine, but

Code:

#!/bin/sh

for file in "$@"
do
	mv "$file"/ ~/.Trash/
done

only works if you're trashing directories. I guess I have much to learn...