Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi. Sure. Here it is. Just the same code with mkdir and an increment of the number variable. Works nicely up until the 10th iteration, then it just continuously creates num_10.

Code:

BASEDIR=$PWD

mkdir -p ${BASEDIR}
mkdir -p ${BASEDIR}/num_0


for f in ${BASEDIR}/num*; do
        [[ -d $f ]] || continue
        base=${f##*/} base=${base%_*}
        num=${f##*_}

        (( num > max[$base] )) && max["$base"]=$num
done
new_num=$((num+1))

LOGDIR=${BASEDIR}/${base}_${new_num}
mkdir -p ${LOGDIR}

I don't see the purpose of extracting the variable base from $f. Given that you start by creating ${BASEDIR}/num_0 and strip off ${BASEDIR}/ and then strip off _0 (or _ followed by some other string of digits), isn't $base always going to expand to the string num?

And after you have created the 1st 11 directories in your sequence, the for loop:

Code:

for f in ${BASEDIR}/num*

will process those directory names in alphabetic order:

Code:

num_0
num_1
num_10
num_2
num_3
num_4
num_5
num_6
num_7
num_8
num_9

and when you exit the loop after processing num_9, the variable num will be set to 9.

You go to a lot of trouble in your loop to set the array element max["num"] to 10, but you don't use that when you create the next directory after you're done. Note that if there are any values for base other than the string num and you tried to use the value of $base after you get out of the loop, there would be a good chance that ${max[$base]} when you get out of the loop would be unrelated to the highest numeric value seen in the loop.

Maybe the following would come closer to what you're trying to do:

Code:

BASEDIR=$PWD
max=0

mkdir -p ${BASEDIR}
mkdir -p ${BASEDIR}/num_$max

for f in ${BASEDIR}/num*
do      [[ -d $f ]] || continue
        num=${f##*_}
        (( num > max )) && max=$num
done
new_num=$((max+1))

LOGDIR=${BASEDIR}/num_${new_num}
mkdir -p ${LOGDIR}

Yes, that's exactly what I was trying to do. Many many thanks for clarifying that and providing the solution.