Shell Programming and Scripting

Dan ,

im using bash here , what ever the best possible way we can go with , here is sample snippet

Code:

For entry in /mydir/*
Do
If [-d "$entry" ,]; then
 Echo "$entry"
 CD $entry
ls *xml 
# we need to diff the first file that was created in each directory of  that day and with latest last file at the time of doing diff
 Diff file1.xml  file2.xml >> diff.txt
Fi
Done

Did you bother to look up "command substitution"?

Try

Code:

diff $(ls -t *.xml | head -1) $(ls -t *.xml | tail -1)

That will give him the oldest *.xml file in the current directory as a 1st operand; not the oldest file created today. And, it isn't clear whether the submitter wants the oldest modification time timestamp today on a file or the oldest timestamp today encoded in the files' names. Note that the specified files to be examined (according to post #1 in this thread) have names like:

Code:

         abc-<time-stamp>.xml
        xyz-<time-stamp>.xml

with varying numbers of leading <blank> characters, three lowercase alphabetic characters, a hyphen, a less-than symbol character, an unspecified time-stamp format string, and a greater-than symbol character, followed by the string .xml.

Note also that the homework question has been asked, and the submitter has not responded to that question! Until that question is answered, please refrain from providing possible solutions in this thread.