UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Dear unix forum,
could I output a list of five books with their file name titles into one file?
In order o output all the contents of all the files with their file names there was:

Code:

find . -type f | while read x; echo -e "\n$x";cat "$x";done > бетховен.txt

In spite of them being successively named 1Atitle... 2Atitle the two first aren't 1A 2A, but 1A ..5A (2
3 4) They actually are: 1АБетховен.. 5АБетховен... It now breaks all things I hoped.

Could the task be done by head, cat or grep command? Cat has no file name parameter, head can't output the whole file and grep has a file name parameter but it's primary use is searching one line. In find I coulnd't write each file by hand ...

i've got another command awk '{ print FILENAME, $0 }' (it claims to show the filename though it shows it didn't end

Currently I blame the Linux learning curve because of google results and non-answered messages and all that after translation if a nice question directly to English. Isn't that it hard to make more help to design unixes language in that way to be really descriptive and write it as you think.
I'm deeply sorry for that grief!...(

Moderator's Comments:

edit by bakunin: please use CODE-tags for code, as required by the forum rules and refrain from excessive formatting. How is text in one-point size in light cyan against a white background supposed to be read?

Hi
Hope i understand you correct:

Code:

touch outfile
echo "" > outfile
while read book
do 	echo "$book" >> outfile
	cat "$book" >> outfile
done<infile

hth

I will try to answer your question but let us start with the biggest problem of them all, in my opinion: your attitude.

What i see is inability to analyse or even describe a problem succinctly. For instance:

What do you mean by "books"? UNIX (or Linux) does not deal with "books", only with files, filenames, directories, etc.. So how does the term "book" map to:

I am already confused. What is "book"? A filename? A part of a filename? A files content? Something else?

Save for the fact that you should indeed use CODE-tags this is clearly nonsense. Either you should use the "xargs" command and pipe the output of "find" to that or use "find"s built-in "-exec" to do these things:

Code:

find . -type f -exec cat {} >> бетховен.txt \;

Note, i used ">>" (append) instead of ">" (overwrite) because otherwise each new file content will wipe out the former one which i suppose you do not want. Also note that you are searching for files and write a file at the same time. Depending on circumstances your output file will be included in "find"s output or not and you should do it in a way where you do not take that chance:

Code:

find . -type f -exec cat {} >> /some/where/else/бетховен.txt \;

OK, by now i think i have successfully guessed what what you mean: You want the file names (=titles?) to be ordered alphabetically. Use the command "sort" to achieve this. Compare the output of these two commands:

Code:

find . -type f
find . -type f | sort

Note, though, that "sort" is influenced by your LOCALE setting. From the few interspersed cyrillic characters i deduce your language setting is not english.

I admit i am confused again. "cat" has indeed a filename parameter (which you already used in your command), your "task" is nowhere described so if "cat", "head", "grep" or some other command is suited to do it we cannot know and although i thought i guessed what you want i now think my guess was wrong. How about describing it instead of letting me exert my psychic talents?

что ?? Could you please explain what you mean?

I hope this helps.

bakunin

I think that this could be shortened and performance improved by only opening the output file once for a write:-

Code:

{ while read book
do
   echo "$$book"
   cat "$book"
done < infile } > outfile

The braces { & } allows you to handle all the output in one block, so it can be written in a single operation far more efficiently than the multiple open-write-close processes of appending within a loop. The echo and the touch seem irrelevant to me, so I've left them out.


Just my thoughts,
Robin

Robin, you got a typo @

Code:

echo "$$book"

I am a fool