UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Greetings!

I'm fairly new to the unix world and I hope someone here can help me with my question. I'm using a Makefile to run a few programs and the final output is several .eps files. However I need them to be .pdf files, so I want to use epstopdf to convert the files.

Since I'm already using a Makefile I'd like to just add an extra line to the file, so I tried:

Code:

convert:
  epstopdf `find -name '*eps'`

however this doesn't work, because epstopdf has too many inputfiles! Any help in how to change this such that epstopdf is called for all the .eps files separately is much appreciated. I still want to be able to just add a (few) lines to my Makefile though.

Cheers!

wwoord

---------- Post updated at 12:40 PM ---------- Previous update was at 12:30 PM ----------

Hi all,

problem solved already, by looking in to other threads on this forum with similar problems. I changed the code to:

Code:

convert:
  ls *.eps | awk '{system("epstopdf "$0 )}'

now epstopdf is called for each .eps file one at a time.

Cheers!

---------- Post updated at 01:05 PM ---------- Previous update was at 12:40 PM ----------

Hi all,

just a quick update, the command I posted works fine:

Code:

ls *.eps | awk '{system("epstopdf "$0 )}'

however in a makefile $ is interpreted as a user variable, so this doesn't work:

Code:

convert: 
  ls *.eps | awk '{system("epstopdf "$0 )}'

adding an extra $ fixes this and now it works fine if called from a makefile!

Code:

convert: 
  ls *.eps | awk '{system("epstopdf "$$0 )}'

You can also try:

Code:

ls *eps | xargs epstopdf

Code:

for f in *eps; do
  epstopdf "$f"
done

With xargs the -n1 option and argument should be used in this case.

Thanks for the suggestion, it worked after I changed it a little bit to:

Code:

ls *eps | xargs -n1 epstopdf

looks a lot better than my my solution for sure!

Cheers

---------- Post updated at 01:54 PM ---------- Previous update was at 01:48 PM ----------

You also thanks for your solution, I just found out I should use the -n1 option with xargs. Your script should also work, but I can't put it in my makefile so then I should add an other file to my directory containing the script and then call it from the makefile. I was trying to avoid creating extra files.

Cheers

I believe that you could also use for expansion (a for loop) in the Makefile (don't ask me how, I never wrote a Makefile ).

P.S. Note that the above pipeline: ls ... | xargs .., will fail for file names containing special (for the current shell) characters.

I'l look in to the possibility of using a for expansion in my Makefile, always nice to be able to solve thinks in more then on way

Thanks for pointing out the special characters, I didn't run in to that problem, but this is an other good reason to avoid special characters in filenames.

If you have filenames with spaces you could do something like:

Code:

ls *.eps |xargs -I{} epstopdf {}