UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi,

I had to do something I could do in a way that worked fine, but I'm still wondering if there's a shorter way (which I think there is)...

I had to find only the ASCII files of a directory, and then work with them (that is, not only showing on screen)

What I did was

Code:

 
ls | xargs file | grep "ASCII" | cut -d ":" -f 1 | xargs something......

That worked pretty well, but I think it's kinda long for such an supposed-to-be-easy task.

So, could you help me finding another way to find only the ASCII files of a directory? If possible, not using sed or awk, since I still don't know these commands at all.

Thanks a lot in advance,

Casey.

Without using power tools like awk/sed/perl it's not possible to shorten your command so your best option is to stick with what you have.

Only think I can think of here to reduce the number of pipelines is to remove the grep and cut and replace with awk.

Code:

ls | xargs file | awk -F: '/ASCII/{print $1}' | xargs something ...

Also an observation. This implementation ( | xargs something) is not "filename with a space" safe. You should use

Code:

xargs -I{} command {}

Huh, I see... Looks like I'll keep using this command until I learn awk/sed.

Also, nice observation reborg.

Thanks to you both for your replies!!


Casey

how about this

Code:

file * | awk -F":" '/ASCII/{print $1}'