I have a RedHat linux box and I had written a script in the past to move files from one location to another with a specific text in the body of the file.
I typically only write scripts once a year so every year I forget more and more... That being said,
Last year I wrote this script and used it and it worked.
For some reason, I can not get it to work today and I know it's a simple issue and I shouldn't even be asking for help but for some reason I'm just not looking at it correctly today.
Here is the script.
ls -1 /var/text.old | while read file
do
grep -q "to.move" $file && mv $file /var/text.old/TBD
done
I'm listing all the files inside the /var/text.old directory.
I'm reading each file
then I'm grep'ing for "to.move" and holing the results
then I'm moving the resulting found files to the folder /var/text.old/TBD
I am an admin and I have rights to the above files and folders.
I can see the data in each file
I can mv them manually
I have use pwd to grab the correct spelling of the directory.
If anyone can just help me to see what the heck I'm missing here that would really make my day.
Thanks in advance.
UPDATE:
The files I need to move do not have Whitespaces.
The Error I'm getting is as follows:
grep: 9829563.msg: No such file or directory
NOTE: the file "982953.msg" is one of the files I need to move.
Also note: I'm getting this error for every file in the directory that I'm listing.
You didn't post any error, but I'm gonna take a guess and say that you have a filename with a space or special shell character.
Let's say you have 3 files, and ls -1 gives us:
hello
world
hey there
Now, while splits on the value of the special $IFS variable, which is set to <space><tab><newline> by default.
So instead of looping of 3 values like you expect (hello, world, and hey there), you loop over 4 values (hello, world, hey, and there).
To fix this, we can do 2 things:
Set IFS to only a newline:
IFS="
"
ls -1 /var/text.old | while read file
...
In general, I like setting IFS to a newline at the start of the script, since I consider this to be slightly "safer", but opinions on this probably vary.
But much better is to not parse the output of ls, and use for:
for file in /var/text.old/*`; do
This won't fork any external processes (piping to ls to while starts 2), and behaves "less surprising" in other ways. See here for some examples.
The second problem is that you're not quoting $file. You should always quote pathnames with double quoted: "$file" for the same reasons. If $file has a space (or a special shell character, such as *, the meaning of your command changes:
file=hey\ *
mv $file /var/text.old/TBD
Becomes:
mv hey * /var/text.old/TBD
Which is obviously very different from what you intended! What you intended was:
mv "hey *" /var/text.old/TBD
Related
I have only two folders under a given directory. Is there any method to choose the second directory based on the order and not on the folder name?
Example: (I want to enter under doc2)
#ls
doc1 doc2
If you really want to use ls,
cd "$(ls -d */ | sed -n '2p')"
selects enters the second directory listed by it, independently of the number of directories provided by ls.
Parsing ls output is not a good idea generally, although it will work in most cases and will cause no harm if you are just using it in your interactive shell for fast navigation. You should not use this for serious programming.
You can use the tail command to get the last line
ls |tail -1
I am using an application that creates a text file on a Linux server. I then have the ability to execute a shell script (BASH 3.2.57) in which I need to convert the text file from Unix line endings to DOS and also change the extension of the file from .txt to .log.
I currently have a sed based command to do this. This command is rewritten by the application at run time to point to the specific folder and file name, in this example where you see ABC (all capital 3 letters in all my examples are a variable that can be any 3 letters).
pushd /rootfolder/parentfolder/ABC/
sed 's/$/\r/' prABC.txt > prABC.log
popd
The problem with this is that if a user runs the application for 2 different groups, say ABC and DEF at nearly the same time, the script will get overwritten with the DEF variables before ABC had a chance to fire off and do its thing with the file. Additionally the .txt is left in the folder regardless and I would like that to be removed.
A friend of mine came up with the following code that seems to work if its determined to be our best solution, but I would think and hope we have a cleaner more dynamic way to do this. Also this current method requires that when my user decides to add a GHI directory and file I now have to update the code, which i can program my application to do for me but i don't want this script to have to be rewritten every time the application wants to use it.
pushd /rootfolder/parentfolder/ABC
if [[ -f prABC.txt ]]
then
sed 's/$/\r/' prABC.txt > prABC.log
rm prABC.txt
fi
popd
pushd /rootfolder/parentfolder/DEF
if [[ -f prABC.txt ]]
then
sed 's/$/\r/' prABC.txt > prABC.log
rm prABC.txt
fi
popd
I would like to call this script at anytime from my application and it find any file named pr*.txt below the /rootfolder/parentfolder/ directory (if that has to include the parentfolder in its search that won't be a problem) and convert the line endings from LF to CRLF and change the extension of the file from .txt to .log.
I've done a ton of searching and have found near solutions for this but not exactly what I need and I want to be sure it's as safe as possible (issues with using "find with for". I don't know what utilities are installed on this build so i would like to keep it as basic/supportable as possible Thanks in advance :)
You should almost never need pushd and popd in scripts. In fact, you rarely need cd, either.
#!/bin/bash
for d in /rootfolder/parentfolder/ABC /rootfolder/parentfolder/DEF
do
if [[ -f "$d/prABC.txt" ]]
then
sed 's/$/\r/' "$d/prABC.txt" > "$d/prABC.log" &&
rm "$d/prABC.txt"
fi
done
Recall that a && b is shorthand for
if a; then
b
fi
In other words, if sed fails (because the source file can't be read, or the destination can't be written) we don't rm the source file. There should be an error message already so we don't add another one.
Not only is this more succinct, it is also easier to change if you decide that the old file should be renamed instead of removed, or you want to filter out all lines which contain "beef" in the sed script. Generally you should avoid repeated code; see also the DRY principle on Wikipedia.
Something is seriously wrong somewhere if you require DOS line endings in your files on Unix.
I am looking to write a script to move files from a directory:
/home/mydir/
To another directory based on tokens in the file name. I have a bunch of files named as such:
red_office_mike_2015_montreal_546968.ext
or
$color_$location_$name_$year_$city_$numbers.extension (files will be various movie files: mov, mp4, mkv, etc.)
I would like the script to move the files to the following location:
/dir/work/$color/$name
Then verify the file has successfully copied, and delete the original file once it has.
I would also love it if the script would create the to directory if it does not already exist.
So in summary, I need a script to move files based on underscore separated tokens, create the to directory if it doesn't already exist, verify the successful copy (maybe with a size check), then delete the original file.
I am working on linux, and would prefer a bash script. The variables I have given are generic, and I will incorporate some other things to the script, I'm just looking for help on building the skeleton.
Thanks in advance for any help!
It's not a bash script, but perl is much better at this kind of thing and is installed on all Linux systems
while(<>) {
chomp;
$file = $_;
($colour, $location, $name, $year, $city, $numbers) = split(/_/,$file);
$dest0 = "/dir/work/$colour";
$dest1 = "$dest0/$name";
mkdir ($dest0) unless (-d $dest0);
mkdir ($dest1) unless (-d $dest1);
rename ($file, "$dest1/$file");
}
The script splits your input file on the underscore character, creates all the directories to the destination and then renames the file to the new filename. Rename takes care of all the copying and deleting for you. In fact it just changes the directory entries without any copying at all.
UPDATE
The above version takes its input from a file containing a list of filenames to process. For an alternative version which processes all files in the current directory, replace the while line with
while(glob("*")) {
I was able to fumble around online and come up with a for loop to do this task. I used cut and it made things simple. Here is what worked for me:
#!/bin/sh
cd "${1:-.}"
for f in *.*; do
color=`echo "$f" | cut -d'_' -f1`
name=`echo "$f" | cut -d'_' -f3`
todir="/dir/work/$color/$name"
mkdir -p "$todir"
mv "$f" "$todir"
done
This worked perfectly and I hope it can help others who might need to create directories based on portions of filenames.
The first line under the shebang made it so that it will either look at the current working directory or a directory you pass it as an argument.
Thanks to those who chimed in on the original post. I'm new with scripting so it take me a while to figure this stuff out. I love this site though, it is super helpful!
Disclaimer: I am very new to Bash scripting (and Linux in general), so forgive me for a stupid question.
A friend of mine gave me a script which makes a backup copy of certain files onto Dropbox. Here's the code in full:
#!/bin/sh
DATE=`date +%Y-%m-%d`
tarname='backup-'$DATE'.tar.gz'
cd ~/
directoriesToBack='.bashrc Desktop/School/ Desktop/Research\ Project'
tar -X ~/Desktop/My\ Programs/scripts/crons/exclude.txt -zcvf $tarname $directoriesToBack
mv $tarname ~/Dropbox
The variable directoriesToBack obviously contains the directories to be copied. Exclude.txt is a text file of files which are not to be backed up.
If I try to run this script, I get an error because of Desktop/Research Project: my computer looks for the directory Desktop/Research instead. I've tried to use double quotes instead of single quotes, and to replace \ with an ordinary space, but these tries didn't work. Does anyone know how I can make a backup of a directory with spaces in its name?
Don't try to do this with strings. It will not work and it will cause pain. See I'm trying to put a command in a variable, but the complex cases always fail! for various details and discussion.
Use an array instead.
#!/bin/bash
DATE=$(date +%Y-%m-%d)
tarname=backup-$DATE.tar.gz
cd ~/
directoriesToBack=(.bashrc Desktop/School "Desktop/Research Project")
tar -X ~/Desktop/My\ Programs/scripts/crons/exclude.txt -zcvf "$tarname" "${directoriesToBack[#]}"
I also fixed the quoting of variables/etc. and used $() instead of backticks for the date command execution (as $() can be nested and generally has better semantics and behaviour).
Please run the script and show the EXACT error message. I suspect that what is going wrong is not what you think it is. I suspect that the envar directoriesToBack is not what you think it is.
cd Desktop/"Research Project" (With Quotation marks)
You'll find that a lot of code in many languages use Quotes to signify a space.
I'm trying to use something along the lines of
unexpand -t 4 *.php
but am unsure how to write this command to do what I want.
Weirdly,
unexpand -t 4 file.php > file.php
gives me an empty file. (i.e. overwriting file.php with nothing)
I can specify multiple files okay, but don't know how to then overwrite each file.
I could use my IDE, but there are ~67000 instances of to be replaced over 200 files, and this will take a while.
I expect that the answers to my question(s) will be standard unix fare, but I'm still learning...
You can very seldom use output redirection to replace the input. Replacing works with commands that support it internally (since they then do the basic steps themselves). From the shell level, it's far better to work in two steps, like so:
Do the operation on foo, creating foo.tmp
Move (rename) foo.tmp to foo, overwriting the original
This will be fast. It will require a bit more disk space, but if you do both steps before continuing to the next file, you will only need as much extra space as the largest single file, this should not be a problem.
Sketch script:
for a in *.php
do
unexpand -t 4 $a >$a-notab
mv $a-notab $a
done
You could do better (error-checking, and so on), but that is the basic outline.
Here's the command I used:
for p in $(find . -iname "*.js")
do
unexpand -t 4 $(dirname $p)/"$(basename $p)" > $(dirname $p)/"$(basename $p)-tab"
mv $(dirname $p)/"$(basename $p)-tab" $(dirname $p)/"$(basename $p)"
done
This version changes all files within the directory hierarchy rooted at the current working directory.
In my case, I only wanted to make this change to .js files; you can omit the iname clause from find if you wish, or use different args to cast your net differently.
My version wraps filenames in quotes, but it doesn't use quotes around 'interesting' directory names that appear in the paths of matching files.
To get it all on one line, add a semi after lines 1, 3, & 4.
This is potentially dangerous, so make a backup or use git before running the command. If you're using git, you can verify that only whitespace was changed with git diff -w.