Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi,

I need to find a file with name xyz.mno.1234235.msg

Here the numbers can be anything and is not fixed. But the first 6 characters are fixed ie, xyz and mno are fixed and wont change. Actually this file comes to this directory every week with only the number part changing.

How is it possible to check whether the file is present and if it is present then how to fetch only the numbers to a variable? Is it possible in shell script.

The script which checks for this file and the above file are in the same directory.


Thanks,
RRVARMA

looking at how some wildcards could work

Code:

>ls -l xyz.mno.???????.msg
-rw-rw---- 1 user dp 0 May 29 08:17 xyz.mno.1234235.msg

>ls -l xyz.mno.???????.msg | tr -s " " | cut -d" " -f9
xyz.mno.1234235.msg

and then finally

Code:

>ls -l xyz.mno.???????.msg | tr -s " " | cut -d" " -f9 | cut -d"." -f3
1234235

explained:
list files
translate characters, squeeze out extra " " space characters
set delimiter to " " and get the 9th field
set delimiter to "." and take the 3rd field

or, to a variable

Code:

>filenm=$(ls -l xyz.mno.???????.msg | tr -s " " | cut -d" " -f9 | cut -d"." -f3)
>echo $filenm
1234235

Not using the -l option saves you from nearly all of the gyrations having to do with extracting the information that you do want. Just drop the -l and the script becomes significantly simpler.

Actually, you could simply use echo with a wildcard and look at the result. Depending on your shell and its settings, the result when the wildcard doesn't match can be either an empty string, or the wildcard expression unexpanded. If it's anything else, the file is there, and the result is the result of the wildcard expansion.

Code:

file=`echo xyz.mno.*.msg`
case $file in
  '' | 'xyx.mno.*.msg') echo no file found;;
  *) echo file $file found;;
esac

Code:

var=`ls xyz.mno.*.msg | awk -F. '{print $3}'`

find . -name "abc.def.[1-9][1-9][1-9].txt"

It will search the file have name like abc.def.123.txt (Inplace of 123 it can be any 3 digit number).

Hi All,

Thank you very much.. I'd get a solution because of you all..

Special thanks to Joeyg.. because i too was trying the same way but in vain.. after getting your reply i could understand where i went wrong and correct myself.. Thanks very much..

Thanks to Era, Danmero, Siba.S.Nayak for giving me other ideas to implement this.. Thanks a lot..

RRVARMA

find . -type f -name "xyz.mno.[0-9]*.msg"