UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Actually my "${full_path_to_dir_to_search}" variable could contain multiple directories to search, separated by spaces. It was working fine when those directories did not have any sub-directories. Now a new directory being added to the search list has sub-directories thus causing my problem.

I think I am going to have to rethink my approach to handling this condition and loop through each dir_to_search separately. I was hoping to do it in one command.

At any rate, I appreciate your help!

Gary

Imho. There is no harm in looping through the directories individually, it is the only way which will work without complex code.
Don't hold a list in an Environment Variable. It will go wrong if any filename or directory name contains space characters.

Here's what I ended up doing which seems to work although I have more testing to do. ${DAT_CHK_DIRS} is the space separated list of paths (We will never have a filename containing a space):

Code:

for search_dir in ${DAT_CHK_DIRS}
do
  find ${search_dir}/* -type d -prune -o -type f -name "*.dat"  \
    -exec echo {} >> ${ERRFILE} \; 2>/dev/null
done

Any .dat files found will be concatenated onto the end of the $ERRFILE (as they should not exist). Just seems inefficient to have to loop through each directory instead of find doing it all but oh well.