Shell Programming and Scripting

Thank you everyone for your replies and assistance. Here is a code that I ended up with that works quite well. It is a combination of information I learned here and some scripts I found scattered on the net.

Code:

IFS='
'
j=`find $1 -printf "%d\n" | sort -u | tail -n 1`
echo "Max dir depth:" $j
for (( i=0; i<=j ; i++ ));
do
	find . -mindepth $i -maxdepth $i -iname "* *" -printf '%p\0' | while IFS= read -r -d '' FN;
	do
		FNnew=`echo "${FN%${FN##*[^ ]}}"`
		echo "$FN" "$FNnew"
		mv "$FN" "${FN%${FN##*[^ ]}}"
	done
done

It works quite well and I understand what is going on. I do however have some questions about the first line. Could someone brief me on exactly what the

Code:

IFS='
'

line is doing? I have seen that line used in other scripts and I'm not 100% certain what its function is. I believe it has been written differently in other scripts as well. Like this:

Code:

IFS='\n'

Taken from man bash: The two forms that you post are equivalent, setting IFS to the <LF> char. But it escapes me to what avail in your code snippet...

RudiC, thanks. I took that code from somewhere on the net and just left that line in. I guess in this particular case, it is unnecessary.

---------- Post updated at 01:25 PM ---------- Previous update was at 11:06 AM ----------

Update to my script:

This line did not calculate the tree depth properly:

Code:

j=`find $1 -printf "%d\n" | sort -u | tail -n 1`

I updated it to this and it works

Code:

find . -printf '%d\n' | sort -n  | tail -1