I have a question regarding the mv command.
In order to move and rename the file, I did mv file someDir/File2 in my terminal and it moved file into someDir with new name called File2.
However, when I do it with shell script, it sees the File2 part as a directory, instead of the new name for the file.
So I have two variables, NEWDir=newDir, NEWF=newName
for i in *.txt ; do
mv $i $NEWDIR/$NEWF
done
I run this script, it says the following:
mv: target 'newName' is not a directory.
mv requires the destination to be a directory only if more than one source argument is given.
In this case, that can be caused by your variables being split due to lack of quoting. Use double quotes -- as http://shellcheck.net/ directs -- around all expansions.
for i in *.txt ; do
mv "$i" "$NEWDIR/$NEWF"
done
Note that only the last file iterated over will actually be left behind with the given name -- the rest will be overwritten by their successors.
Related
I am trying to copy an existing file (that is found in across directories) to a new file with a new name in Bash. For example, 'Preview.json' to 'Performance.json'. I have tried using
find * -type f -name 'Preview.json' -exec cp {} {}"QA" \;
But ended up with 'Preview.jsonQA'. (I am new to Bash.) I have tried moving the "QA" in front of the {} but I got errors because of an invalid path.
In an -exec predicate, the symbol {} represents a path that is being considered, starting at one of the starting-point directories designated in the command. Example: start/dir2/Preview.json. You can form other file names by either prepending or appending characters, but whether that makes sense depends on the details. In your case, appending produces commands such as
cp start/dir2/Preview.json start/dir2/Preview.jsonQA
which is a plausible command in the event that start/dir2/Preview.json exists. But cp does not automatically create directories in the destination path, so the result of prepending characters ...
cp start/dir2/Preview.json QAstart/dir2/Preview.json
... is not as likely to be accepted -- it depends on directory QAstart/dir2 existing.
I think what you're actually looking for may be cp commands of the form ...
cp start/dir2/Preview.json start/dir2/QAPreview.json
... but find cannot do this by itself.
For more flexibility in handling the file names discovered by find, pipe its output into another command. If you want to pass them as command-line arguments to another command, then you can interpose the xargs command to achieve that. The command on the receiving end of the pipe can be a shell function or a compound command if you wish.
For example,
# Using ./* instead of * ensures that file names beginning with - will not
# be misinterpreted as options:
find ./* -type f -name 'Preview.json' |
while IFS= read -r name; do # Read one line and store it in variable $name
# the destination name needs to be computed differently if the name
# contains a / character (the usual case) than if it doesn't:
case "${name}" in
*/*) cp "${name}" "${name%/*}/QA${name##*/}" ;;
*) cp "${name}" "QA${name}" ;;
esac
done
Note that that assumes that none of your directory names contain newline characters (the read command would split up newline-containing filenames). That's a reasonably safe assumption, but not absolutely safe.
Of course, you would generally want to have that in a script, not to try to type it on the fly on the command line.
Is it possible to write a script to rename all files after the extension?
Example in the folder, there are :
hello.txt-123ahr
bye.txt-56athe
test.txt-98hg12
I want the output:
hello.txt
bye.txt
test.txt
If you just want to remove everything from the dash forwards, you can use Parameter expansion:
#!/bin/bash
for file in *.txt-* ; do
mv "$file" "${file%-*}"
done
Where ${file%-*} means "remove from $file everytning from the last dash". If you want to start from the first dash, use %%.
Note that you might overwrite some files if their leading parts are equivalent, e.g. hello.txt-123abc and hello.txt-456xyz.
I am having a file named temp.txt where inside this file it contains the following content
https://abcdef/12345-xyz
https://ghifdfg/5426525-abc
I need to create a directories automatically in linux by using only th number part from each line in the file.
So the output should be something like 12345 and 5426525 directories created.
Any approach on how to do this could be helpful.
This is the code that i searched and got from internet,wherein this code, new directories will be created by the file name that starts with BR and W0 .
for file in {BR,W0}*.*; do
dir=${file%%.*}
mkdir -p "$dir"
mv "$file" "$dir"
done
Assuming each URL is of the form
http[s]://any/symbols/some_digits-some_letters
Then you indeed could use the simple prefix and suffix modifiers in shell variable expansion.
${x##*/} expands to the suffix part of x that starts after the last slash /.
${y%%-*} expands to the prefix part of y before the first -.
while read x ; do
y=${x##*/}
z=${y%%-*}
mkdir $z
done < temp.txt
How can I use the relative path or absolute path as a single command line argument in a shell script?
For example, suppose my shell script is on my Desktop and I want to loop through all the text files in a folder that is somewhere in the file system.
I tried sh myshscript.sh /home/user/Desktop, but this doesn't seem feasible. And how would I avoid directory names and file names with whitespace?
myshscript.sh contains:
for i in `ls`
do
cat $i
done
Superficially, you might write:
cd "${1:-.}" || exit 1
for file in *
do
cat "$file"
done
except you don't really need the for loop in this case:
cd "${1:-.}" || exit 1
cat *
would do the job. And you could avoid the cd operation with:
cat "${1:-.}"/*
which lists (cats) all the files in the given directory, even if the directory or the file names contains spaces, newlines or other difficult to manage characters. You can use any appropriate glob pattern in place of * — if you want files ending .txt, then use *.txt as the pattern, for example.
This breaks down if you might have so many files that the argument list is too long. In that case, you probably need to use find:
find "${1:-.}" -type f -maxdepth 1 -exec cat {} +
(Note that -maxdepth is a GNU find extension.)
Avoid using ls to generate lists of file names, especially if the script has to be robust in the face of spaces, newlines etc in the names.
Use a glob instead of ls, and quote the loop variable:
for i in "$1"/*.txt
do
cat "$i"
done
PS: ShellCheck automatically points this out.
I need help copying content from various files to others (same name and format, different path).
For example, $HOME/initial/baby.desktop has text which I need to write into $HOME/scripts/baby.desktop. This is very simple for a single file, but I have 2500 files in $HOME/initial/ and the same number in $HOME/scripts/ with corresponding names (same names and format). I want append (copy) the content of file in path A to path B (which have the same name and format), to the end of file in path B without erase the content of file in path B.
Example content of $HOME/initial/*.desktop to final $HOME/scripts/*.desktop. I tried the following, but it don't work:
cd $HOME/initial/
for i in $( ls *.desktop ); do egrep "Icon" $i >> $HOME/scripts/$i; done
Firstly, I would backup $HOME/initial and $HOME/scripts, because there is lots of scope for people misunderstanding your question. Like this:
cd $HOME
tar -cvf initial.tar initial
tar -cvf scripts.tar scripts
That will put all the files in $HOME/initial into a single tarfile called initial.tar and all the files in $HOME/scripts into a single tarfile called scripts.tar.
Now for your question... in general, if you want to put the contents of FileB onto the end of FileA, the command is
cat FileB >> FileA
Note the DOUBLE ">>" which means "append" rather than single ">" which means overwrite.
So, I think you want to do this:
cd $HOME/initial/baby.desktop
cat SomeFile >> $HOME/scripts/baby.desktop/SomeFile
where SomeFile is the name of any file you choose to test with. I would test that has worked and then, if you are happy with that, go ahead and run the same command inside a loop:
cd $HOME/initial/baby.desktop
for SOURCE in *
do
DESTINATION="$HOME/scripts/baby.desktop/$SOURCE"
echo Appending "$SOURCE" to "$DESTINATION"
#cat "$SOURCE" >> "$DESTINATION"
done
When the output looks correct, remove the "#" at the start of the penultimate line and run it again.
I solved it, if some people want learn how to resolve is very simple:
using Sed
I need only the match (or pattern) line "Icon=/usr/share/some_picture.png into $HOME/initial/example.desktop to other with same name and format $HOME/scripts/example.desktop, but I had a lot of .desktop files (2500 files)
cd $HOME/initial
STRING_LINE=`grep -l -R "Icon=" *.desktop`
for i in $STRING_LINE; do sed -ne '/Icon=/ p' $i >> $HOME/scripts/$i ; done
_________
If you need only copy all to other file with same name and format
using cat
cd $HOME/initial
STRING_LINE=`grep -l -R "Icon=" *.desktop`
for i in $STRING_LINE; do cat $i >> $HOME/scripts/$i ; done