Shell Programming and Scripting

Running complex external utilities like cut and awk to operate on single lines is very wasteful. You might be spending more time loading and quitting these things than doing anything else. You can improve that a lot by using read's own built-in processing abilities.

Code:

find /path/to/files -type f -printf "%p %A+ %6s %T+ %C+\n" |
while read name atime size mtime ctime
do
        # sets $1 to md5sum output, $2 to filename, etc.
        set -- `md5sum $name`
        echo "$atime (a), $size, $name $1"
        echo "$mtime (m), $size, $name $1"
        echo "$ctime (c), $size, $name $1"
done

Or since you were using awk anyway, do it all in awk:

Code:

# -print pattern has no %p or newline.  then it runs md5sum which adds both 
find /path/to/files -type f -printf "%A+ %6s %T+ %C+ " -exec md5sum '{}' ';' |
awk '{
        print $1, "(a),", $2 ",", $6, $5;
        print $3, "(m),", $2 ",", $6, $5;
        print $4, "(c),", $2 ",", $6, $5;
}'

Hi Corona688,
Thanks a million for the reply. The reason I had to use cut was because it was the only way I could get it to work with spaces in the directory. No matter what I tried I couldn't get awk to work with md5sum correctly. You first method has problems with spaces as well., but your second method using awk seems to work although it does truncate the directory it does seem to generate the md5sum fine... and it seems faster than my method so I will have a better look at that one.

Thanks a million Corona688...

---------- Post updated at 06:04 AM ---------- Previous update was at 05:34 AM ----------

Hi Corona688,

Your second piece of code seems to be perfect. And unless I am missing something I don't need the awk part.

Code:

find /media/Vista/ProgramData/ -type f -printf "%A+ %T+ %C+ %6s " -exec md5sum '{}' ';'

It does create it all on one line, but to be honest this is probably for the best, meaning I need only have one line for each file I work with. Its a lot faster and only uses much less storage space (file or db)... I will test it a bit more, but think its the perfect answer. Thank you very much.

No, you don't need the awk part, all that was for was to turn it into three lines