Shell Programming and Scripting

dear all

i trying to list all files within a directory. I want to exclude all subdirectory and some files, with using below statement, but it not exclude the files which start with "&" and end with "SL" , is there any things wrong with the below statement ?

TIA

cd /myaccount/mydirectory
for each in `ls -l|grep -v "drw"|awk '{print $9}'|egrep -v "&|SL$"`
do
....
done

ayang,

I dont know how files can start with a &. As far as I know, & is used to push a command to the background.

Anyway, keeping & aside, the rest of the script would like something like this...

Code:

for file in `ls`
do
[[ ! -d $file ]] && echo $file | sed -e '/SL$/d' && your command to carry out on $file
done

I have replaced grep, grep and awk with a sed. Better to use existing builtin commands to do what other external commands can do.

The sed will remove those files which end with SL

Vino

The use of ls here is unnecessary, the shell can expand glob patterns to do this.
for example:

Code:

for file in *
do
[[ ! -d $file ]] && echo $file | sed -e '/SL$/d' && your command to carry out on $file
done

reborg...thanks

vino

No problems, in a small script like is it won't make much difference, but where possible you should try to avoid making calls to external tools because the builtin functionality is much quicker.

Sorry, but this does not have to be true always: If the directory has a real lot of files in it you might run into problems with the shell filename expansion.

In this case it is better to rely on a pipeline:

Code:

ls -1 | sed '/<filterexpression>/d' | while read file ; do whatever_you_want $file ; done

*sigh*
Still I agree to the sentiment that it is better to use the least resource-consuming solution possible. Whenever I see something like "...| awk 'print $1' | ..." i shake my head.

*deep sigh*

In more than 10 years of shell programming I encountered about a dozen of opportunities where the usage of awk made sense. In the same time i have seen tons of opportunities where awk was just a waste ofmachine resources. This is nothing to be said against awk, just against its usage as a tool for regexp lazybones.

*very deep sigh*

bakunin

Dear All,

Thanks for guiding my error. Yes now i able to get the result i want.
Somefile in unix with "&" is actually directory file of database (call uniVerse)
thanks again