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Variable with several values and spaces.

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# 1  
Old 02-17-2011
Variable with several values and spaces.
Hello all. I am a newb obviously and a bit stumped on this, so any help gratefully accepted.

The script is extracting metadata from individual mp3 files, then (hopefully will be) sorting them into newly-created subdirectories. I have filtered out the relevant metadata and have the album names listed in a temporary file, one entry per line, like this -

Code:
"Elvis Presley"
"Elvis Presley"
"Pot Luck with Elvis"
"Kid Galahad And Girls! Girls! Girls! (Elvis Double Features) [REMST]"

So what I am trying to do from here is create a directory for each line.
So far I have this-

Code:
#make a new subdirectory for each album
for VARIA in $ALBUMNAMES ;
do
  mkdir $2/$VARIA
done

which splits everything by individual word like this -

Code:
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Feb 17 20:49 (Elvis
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Feb 17 20:49 And
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Feb 17 20:49 Double
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Feb 17 20:49 Elvis
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Feb 17 20:49 Features)
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Feb 17 20:49 Galahad
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Feb 17 20:49 Girls!
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Feb 17 20:49 Kid
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Feb 17 20:49 Luck
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Feb 17 20:49 Pot
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Feb 17 20:49 Presley
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Feb 17 20:49 [REMST]
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  692 Feb 17 20:49 initial_output
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Feb 17 20:49 with

..which is obviously not what I want. How can I get the for loop to run once for each line of input rather than once for each word?

Thanks in advance

spoov
# 2  
Old 02-17-2011
See if this works for you:
Code:
while read mLine
do
  echo "mLine = <"${mLine}">"
done < input_file

# 3  
Old 02-17-2011
for treats things as words:

(from ksh man page)

Code:
       for vname [ in word ... ] ;do list ;done
              Each  time  a for command is executed, vname is set to the next word taken from the in word list.  If in
              word ...  is omitted, then the for command executes the do list once for each positional parameter  that
              is  set starting from 1 (see Parameter Expansion below).  Execution ends when there are no more words in
              the list.

Use while instead.

Code:
cat file1 | while read ALBUMNAME; do
  mkdir "$ALBUMNAME"
done

Replace cat file1 here with whatever produces your list.

i.e.

Code:
something_that_produces_my_album_list | while read ALBUMNAME
...
...

If whatever produces that list has the literal quotes (") around the names, you can use eval mkdir ..., or otherwise remove them.
# 4  
Old 02-17-2011
@Shelllife - I don't know where to start with that one sorry.


@Scottn - thanks but that doesn't seem to work -

Code:
cat initial_output | grep Album | sed 's/Album: //' | sed 's/^.*/"&/' | sed 's/.*$/&"/' | while read $ALBUMNAME;
  do
   mkdir "$ALBUMNAME"
  done

gives:

Code:
kermit:~/shelltestingground # /home/spoovy/bin/unstable/mp3sort.sh /home/spoovy/testfiles/ .
mkdir: cannot create directory `': No such file or directory
mkdir: cannot create directory `': No such file or directory
mkdir: cannot create directory `': No such file or directory
mkdir: cannot create directory `': No such file or directory
kermit:~/shelltestingground # ls
initial_output
kermit:~/shelltestingground #

# 5  
Old 02-17-2011
What's with all the pipes? You want to create directories that have quotes in the names?

Code:
grep Album initial_output | while read ALBUM; do
  mkdir "${ALBUM/Album: /}"
done

This User Gave Thanks to Scott For This Post:
spoovy
# 6  
Old 02-17-2011
Spoovy, you wrote:
Quote:
...have the album names listed in a temporary file, one entry per line...
Then:
Code:
while read mLine
do
  echo "mLine = <"${mLine}">"
done < The_Name_Of_Your_Temporary_File_Here

# 7  
Old 02-18-2011
scottn - the filtering was in order to get 'clean' album names from messy metadata. By adding quotes I thought it might make my loop process recognise one record per line rather than one per word; but it obviously did't work.

Your suggestion worked though, thanks. I didn't know exactly how/why yet, but i'll look into it!

Thanks!



Shell_life - thanks for your suggestion. I didn't follow it because I am trying to learn to shell program, and copy/pasting suggestions without understanding them at all is not much help to me, however perfect the code suggested. Thanks anyway though.

---------- Post updated at 11:28 AM ---------- Previous update was at 10:57 AM ----------

One more question then scottn, now i've looked at the code a bit more:

This line:
Code:
mkdir "${ALBUM/Album: /}"

Obviously makes a directory called

Code:
Elvis!

based on the string

Code:
Album: Elvis!


How does it do this? I would have thought sed or awk or something would be required to edit the line in some way, but there doesn't seem to be any utility present. Is this a function of mkdir?

Also, this doesn't work when the album name has a slash in it ie

Code:
mkdir: cannot create directory `Flaming Star/Wild in the Country/Follow That Dream': No such file or directory

Any ideas how to get around this?

Thanks.
Last edited by spoovy; 02-18-2011 at 08:31 AM..
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