Shell Programming and Scripting

Thank you for taking the time to reply, but I really don't understand what the big confusion is.

I need to search several directories for a specific directory name, which will occur in every directory and then make a symlink in the working directory and append it's name with a part of the file name that will tell me where it came from. Those characters are 53:14 ... I'm very sorry my "example" was only nine - it was only an example as I said.



The deal is that these directories are 5 or 6 levels deep in each and I have to go to them often and I'm sick of digging through each folder each time. If I have smylinks in one directory that tells me where they came from I have a single click option to get to them.



I understand that find doesn't expand a variable or whatever which is why I'm asking for help on how to do it.

I'm sorry I haven't done this in a while so I'm a bit rusty.



I need the result of find to be set as a variable that I can extract 53:14 from and use it in the file name of the symlink.


I work in production. We have hundreds of shots and each one has a render directory. I would like to make one directory that has symlinks to all of them with their names which happen to be in the path at 53:14.
The final result would look exactly like this: BT_907_725_150 Renders



I don't think I can be any more clear than that.

I'm really frustrated, sorry.

You have at least three people who have responded to your question asking for a very easy to provide sample of the pathnames you're trying to process and the corresponding ln commands you hope to create from those pathnames. Imagine how frustrated we are to see that after being asked for this data four times you still refuse to give us any sample data to work with.

If you would have given us the information I requested in post #2 in this thread 22 hours ago, I'm absolutely positive that you would have had a working script at least 14 hours ago. Since you refuse to give us the information we need to be sure we have something that will meet your needs, maybe we should all just give up.

Please show us a couple of sample pathnames produced by:

Code:

find . -type d -name 'blablabla'

(presumably replacing blablabla by whatever directory filename or filename pattern you're really using), and show us the corresponding exact ln commands you hope to produce from those pathnames.

If you're unable to meet this simple request in your next post, I'll close this thread, remember the amount of time I've wasted trying to help you, and never respond to any of your future posts again.

In production we have NDAs. I can't just go posting stuff like that. I'll have to make up similar paths. Yes, even the names of the production are protected.


I still don't understand why you need the sample path. All I need to do is extract the characters from 53:14 and put them into the symlink name. Why is that so hard to understand?
I can do it by setting each shot as a variable but that's a hassle. I figured someone here would know how to do it much easier.

I really don't see what supplying a bunch of big long paths are going to do for anyone. I've already explained where the characters are that I need to extract and pipe in the name.


If I knew more of what you need I'd already know how to do it. I don't. I'm trying.

What supplying a bunch of big long paths with corresponding sample ln commands that you want to produce from those big long paths would do is give us some actual sample data that we could use to make the rest of your inconsistent and confusing requirements make sense. You have shown us examples of strings containing less than 53 characters and you say you want to extract 14 characters from those strings, and then you show us samples where those 14 characters are only 9 characters.

You know exactly what we need. We have asked for it several times and shown you exactly how to produce it. If you couldn't show us the actual data, you could easily have run the requested find command and obfuscated sensitive parts of the generated path (while keeping the same number of characters) and showing us the ln commands with identical obfuscations.

Instead you tell us we are frustrating you by not being able to guess at what you want from the inconsistent samples you have shown us.

I will make one last attempt based on nezabudka's earlier suggestions. With no sample data to work from, I have absolutely no confidence that this even some close to what you want. Try using it at your own peril:

Code:

find . -type d -name 'blablabla' | while read -r path
do	ln -s "$path" "${path:53:14} blablabla"
done

and be warned that creating directory names that contain <space>s (whether actual directories or symbolic links pointing to directories) frequently leads to broken shell scripts falling far short of their intended goal. Nonetheless, a <space> has been included in the symbolic link names this script produces as you seem to require.

Without trying that code, it looks to be exactly what I need. Thank you. I'm fairly confident it will work. Also, I can easily use an underscore instead of a space, which I will per your recommendation.
I didn't mean that I was frustrated by this page and the people helping me, what I meant that was I was frustrated trying to work it out in the shell, alone. Sorry for that.
I really appreciate everyone's help, although I didn't think it would be this much trouble. I would imagine what I'm seeking to do would be fairly common.

Ok, this code,

Code:

find ../ -type d -name 'Renders' | while read -r path ; do ln -s "$path" "${path:53:14}_Renders” ; done

results in nothing. I just get a ">." I'm sure there's a name for the non-result but I don't know what it is.
I'm running this as a single line from a bash shell. Should it go in a script? I'll try that.

Well, putting it into a script and running that, I discovered that the quotes didn't match, but once I fixed that, it works!

Thank you, Don and everyone, for your help.

Yes. Having mismatched quotes will cause the shell to give you a secondary prompt and then it will wait for you to type in the rest of the string and its terminating quote.

Fantastic success! The script works even better than I'd hoped after I set some variable for other files I want links to.

Thanks so much! This code is truly awesome.

Code:

#!/bin/sh
#Variables
where='/mnt/xxxx/xxxxxx/Season_02/xx_xxx/Shots'
what='Render'

find $where -type d -name $what | while read -r path
do ln -s "$path" "${path:53:14}_$what"
done