Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi

I hope someone will be able to resolve this little teaser!

I am running a script

for file in `ls directory`
do
echo "$file"
...other code here....
done

this works fine unless we receive a file with a name which has a space in it

ie

"filena me"

(I know its not good to have a space in a filename but we have no control over the filenames which are ftp'd to us.)

If the file "filena me" is in the directory, the above script will do the following:

filena
...do other stuff....

me
...do other stuff....

whereas I would like it to do

filena me
....do other stuff....


Can anyone help me please?

Thanks
Helen

Replace
for file in `ls directory`
with
cd directory
for file in *

Thanks Perderabo, This works fine!

u can also use

for fine in `ls directory | tr -s " "`
{
loop
}

I am trying to run the following

for fname in *
do
echo $fname
done

to list all the files in a specific directory. This does not seem to include the files starting with . character (e.g .classpath)

then i modified the program to include ls -A

for fname in $(ls -A)
do
echo $fname
done

This is including the . files. But it splits the file containing spaces into multiple entries (Hello name.txt => Hello, name.txt)

Just wondering is there a way to modify the * option to include the hidden files.

Any help is very much appreciated.

Thanks
ben

Try:
for name in * .* ; do

Get the spacing right! First asterisk is surrounded by spaces, 2nd is not.

Hi Ben,
I think "ls -A" is the best way to go, using "ls * .*" will also list contents of directories, even above, and I guess You don't want that. Well, just a guess anyway.

One of the beauties of ls (and many other utilities) is that when piped to another program it will regard each file/entry as a line, as opposed to when written to screen where it will all appear continuously, also when produced as a string for the "for fname in " construct.

So if You use "while" and try something like this instead,

Code:

ls -A | while read fname ; do echo $fname ; done

maybe You will be a bit closer to a solution? It of course depends on what You want to do with the names, are the entries interesting only if they are files, then use something like

Code:

ls -A|while read line;do [ -f "$line" ]  && echo $line;done

/Lakris