Shell Programming and Scripting

We ran into a problem because of a shop that uses Windows and UNIX.

The file names that Windows uses have spaces in them. When they get moved to the unix system they still have spaces. This produces a problem in our script that moves them again from one unix system to another. I've made up a small example below.

Filenames in directory $MOVEITEMS:
Program mgmt.cfg
Teir 1.cfg
Teir 2.cfg

Script example:

for i in `ls $MOVEITEMS`
do
rcp -rp $MOVEITEMS/$i $DESTSYS:/export/received/$i
done

In this example, the "for" loop snags the space in the middle of the file name and seperates it. It tries to rcp the file Program and then the file mgmt.cfg, and so on.

I thought about using single quotes to capture the space but the single quote also causes the $ to be read as a character and not the beginning of a variable.

Any thoughts?

Jim Campanella

Try using double quotes instead of single quotes.
Single quotes does not allow for variable substitution.
Double quotes does.

Something like this ?

Code:

ls > moveitems.list

while read line
do
  rcp -rp "$MOVEITEMS/$line" "$DESTSYS:/export/received/$line"
done < moveitems.list