Read filename with * shell bash - linux

I'am new in Linux and I want to write a bash script that can read in a file name of a directory that starts with LED + some numbers.(Ex.: LED5.5.002)
In that directory there is only one file that will starts with LED. The problem is that this file will every time be updated, so the next time it will be for example LED6.5.012 and counting.
I searched and tried a little bit and came to this solution:
export fspec=/home/led/LED*
LedV=`basename $fspec`
echo $LedV
If I give in those commands one by one in my terminal it works fine, LedV= LED5.5.002 but if i run it in a bash scripts it gives the result: LedV = LED*
I search after another solution:
a=/home/led/LED*
LedV=$(basename $a)
echo $LedV
but here again the same, if i give it in one by one it's ok but in a script: LedV = LED*.
It's probably something small but because of my lack of knowledge over Linux I cannot find it. So can someone tell what is wrong?
Thanks! Jan

Shell expansions don't happen on scalar assignments, so in
varname=foo*
the expansion of "$varname" will literally be "foo*". It's more confusing when you consider that echo $varname (or in your case basename $varname; either way without the double quotes) will cause the expansion itself to be treated as a glob, so you may well think the variable contains all those filenames.
Array expansions are another story. You might just want
fspec=( /path/LED* )
echo "${fspec[0]##*/}" # A parameter expansion to strip off the dirname
That will work fine for bash. Since POSIX sh doesn't have arrays like this, I like to give an alternative approach:
for fspec in /path/LED*; do
break
done
echo "${fspec##*/}"

pwd
/usr/local/src
ls -1 /usr/local/src/mysql*
/usr/local/src/mysql-cluster-gpl-7.3.4-linux-glibc2.5-x86_64.tar.gz
/usr/local/src/mysql-dump_test_all_dbs.sql
if you only have 1 file, you will only get 1 result
MyFile=`ls -1 /home/led/LED*`

Related

Strange output from bash one liner

While in the course of learning bash, I often tweak an existing thing and see it's output.
~$ for i in {1..19}; do echo "Everything in UNIX is a file."; sleep 1; done
I had this, and out of curiosity I tweaked the above one into the following:-
~$ for i in {1..19 * 2}; do echo "Everything in UNIX is a file."; echo "The value of i is ${i}"; sleep 1; done
Now to my surprise I started getting the following output :-
Everything in UNIX is a file.
The value of i is OneDrive
Everything in UNIX is a file.
The value of i is opera autoupdate
Everything in UNIX is a file.
The value of i is Personal_Workspace
Everything in UNIX is a file.
The value of i is Pictures
Everything in UNIX is a file.
The value of i is PrintHood
Everything in UNIX is a file.
The value of i is Recent
Everything in UNIX is a file.
The value of i is Roaming
Everything in UNIX is a file.
The value of i is Saved Games
Everything in UNIX is a file.
The value of i is Searches
Some of the values of i are the names of files and directories in my home directory, I am in home directory, while executing this script.
What I was expecting that the i values would range from 1 to 19*2 = 38, so i would take values from 1,2,3...30...38.
But obviously it did n't Why?
Yes in bash, range expansion happens before everything else. You were expecting arithmetic expansion to happen which did not happen as expected because of the order of expansion bash shell. Your code ended up interpreting {1..19, * and 2} as literal strings.
Since * has a special meaning in shell which is a glob expansion listing all files/directories in current folder. Also you could see one entry stating the other two strings interpreted literally.
From the man bash(1) page under section Expansion
The order of expansions is: brace expansion, tilde expansion, parameter, variable and arithmetic expansion and command substitution (done in a left-to-right fashion), word splitting, and pathname expansion.
You are much better off using a for loop with a ((..)) construct if you are targeting scripts for bourne again shell
for ((i=1; i<=38; i++)); do
The * symbol in unix shell translates to a wildcard, so basically what {1..19 * 2} means is 1 through 19, all files in current dir (that's the *), and than 2. these will be the values of i in your loop

"read" command not executing in "while read line" loop [duplicate]

This question already has answers here:
Read user input inside a loop
(6 answers)
Closed 5 years ago.
First post here! I really need help on this one, I looked the issue on google, but can't manage to find an useful answer for me. So here's the problem.
I'm having fun coding some like of a framework in bash. Everyone can create their own module and add it to the framework. BUT. To know what arguments the script require, I created an "args.conf" file that must be in every module, that kinda looks like this:
LHOST;true;The IP the remote payload will connect to.
LPORT;true;The port the remote payload will connect to.
The first column is the argument name, the second defines if it's required or not, the third is the description. Anyway, long story short, the framework is supposed to read the args.conf file line by line to ask the user a value for every argument. Here's the piece of code:
info "Reading module $name argument list..."
while read line; do
echo $line > line.tmp
arg=`cut -d ";" -f 1 line.tmp`
requ=`cut -d ";" -f 2 line.tmp`
if [ $requ = "true" ]; then
echo "[This argument is required]"
else
echo "[This argument isn't required, leave a blank space if you don't wan't to use it]"
fi
read -p " $arg=" answer
echo $answer >> arglist.tmp
done < modules/$name/args.conf
tr '\n' ' ' < arglist.tmp > argline.tmp
argline=`cat argline.tmp`
info "Launching module $name..."
cd modules/$name
$interpreter $file $argline
cd ../..
rm arglist.tmp
rm argline.tmp
rm line.tmp
succes "Module $name execution completed."
As you can see, it's supposed to ask the user a value for every argument... But:
1) The read command seems to not be executing. It just skips it, and the argument has no value
2) Despite the fact that the args.conf file contains 3 lines, the loops seems to be executing just a single time. All I see on the screen is "[This argument is required]" just one time, and the module justs launch (and crashes because it has not the required arguments...).
Really don't know what to do, here... I hope someone here have an answer ^^'.
Thanks in advance!
(and sorry for eventual mistakes, I'm french)
Alpha.
As #that other guy pointed out in a comment, the problem is that all of the read commands in the loop are reading from the args.conf file, not the user. The way I'd handle this is by redirecting the conf file over a different file descriptor than stdin (fd #0); I like to use fd #3 for this:
while read -u3 line; do
...
done 3< modules/$name/args.conf
(Note: if your shell's read command doesn't understand the -u option, use read line <&3 instead.)
There are a number of other things in this script I'd recommend against:
Variable references without double-quotes around them, e.g. echo $line instead of echo "$line", and < modules/$name/args.conf instead of < "modules/$name/args.conf". Unquoted variable references get split into words (if they contain whitespace) and any wildcards that happen to match filenames will get replaced by a list of matching files. This can cause really weird and intermittent bugs. Unfortunately, your use of $argline depends on word splitting to separate multiple arguments; if you're using bash (not a generic POSIX shell) you can use arrays instead; I'll get to that.
You're using relative file paths everywhere, and cding in the script. This tends to be fragile and confusing, since file paths are different at different places in the script, and any relative paths passed in by the user will become invalid the first time the script cds somewhere else. Worse, you aren't checking for errors when you cd, so if any cd fails for any reason, then entire rest of the script will run in the wrong place and fail bizarrely. You'd be far better off figuring out where your system's root directory is (as an absolute path), then referencing everything from it (e.g. < "$module_root/modules/$name/args.conf").
Actually, you're not checking for errors anywhere. It's generally a good idea, when writing any sort of program, to try to think of what can go wrong and how your program should respond (and also to expect that things you didn't think of will also go wrong). Some people like to use set -e to make their scripts exit if any simple command fails, but this doesn't always do what you'd expect. I prefer to explicitly test the exit status of the commands in my script, with something like:
command1 || {
echo 'command1 failed!' >&2
exit 1
}
if command2; then
echo 'command2 succeeded!' >&2
else
echo 'command2 failed!' >&2
exit 1
fi
You're creating temp files in the current directory, which risks random conflicts (with other runs of the script at the same time, any files that happen to have names you're using, etc). It's better to create a temp directory at the beginning, then store everything in it (again, by absolute path):
module_tmp="$(mktemp -dt module-system)" || {
echo "Error creating temp directory" >&2
exit 1
}
...
echo "$answer" >> "$module_tmp/arglist.tmp"
(BTW, note that I'm using $() instead of backticks. They're easier to read, and don't have some subtle syntactic oddities that backticks have. I recommend switching.)
Speaking of which, you're overusing temp files; a lot of what you're doing with can be done just fine with shell variables and built-in shell features. For example, rather than reading line from the config file, then storing them in a temp file and using cut to split them into fields, you can simply echo to cut:
arg="$(echo "$line" | cut -d ";" -f 1)"
...or better yet, use read's built-in ability to split fields based on whatever IFS is set to:
while IFS=";" read -u3 arg requ description; do
(Note that since the assignment to IFS is a prefix to the read command, it only affects that one command; changing IFS globally can have weird effects, and should be avoided whenever possible.)
Similarly, storing the argument list in a file, converting newlines to spaces into another file, then reading that file... you can skip any or all of these steps. If you're using bash, store the arg list in an array:
arglist=()
while ...
arglist+=("$answer") # or ("#arg=$answer")? Not sure of your syntax.
done ...
"$module_root/modules/$name/$interpreter" "$file" "${arglist[#]}"
(That messy syntax, with the double-quotes, curly braces, square brackets, and at-sign, is the generally correct way to expand an array in bash).
If you can't count on bash extensions like arrays, you can at least do it the old messy way with a plain variable:
arglist=""
while ...
arglist="$arglist $answer" # or "$arglist $arg=$answer"? Not sure of your syntax.
done ...
"$module_root/modules/$name/$interpreter" "$file" $arglist
... but this runs the risk of arguments being word-split and/or expanded to lists of files.

storing output of ls command consisting of files with spaces in their names

I want to store output of ls command in my bash script in a variable and use each file name in a loop, but for example one file in the directory has name "Hello world", when I do variable=$(ls) "Hello" and "world" end up as two separate entries, and when I try to do
for i in $variable
do
mv $i ~
done
it shows error that files "Hello" and "world" doesn't exist.
Is there any way I can access all files in current directory and run some command even if the files have space(s) in their names.
If you must, dirfiles=(/path/of/interest/*).
And accept the admonition against parsing the output of ls!
I understand you are new to this and I'd like to help. But it isn't easy for me (us?) to provide you with an answer that would be of much help to you by the way you've stated your question.
Based on what I hear so far, you don't seem to have a basic understanding on how parameter expansions work in the shell. The following two links will be useful to you:
Matching Pathnames, Parameters
Now, if your task at hand is to operate on files meeting certain criteria then find(1) will likely to do the job.
Say it with me: don't parse the output of ls! For more information, see this post on Unix.SE.
A better way of doing this is:
for i in *
do
mv -- "$i" ~
done
or simply
mv -- * ~

change multiple files commandline

I have separated some tracks from mp3 mixes using mp3splt.
BASH: (mp3splt -c('**!!***use .cue file***!!**') [cuefile.cue] [nonstopmix.mp3] ~for anyone interested, is in the Ubu repos~)
And I ended up with these filenames: "Antares" - 01 - "Xibalba".mp3 which is not a format I prefer, now I've made it a little project to change them with a shell script but its more difficult than I anticipated.
I want to change the filename from:
"Antares" - 01 - "Xibalba".mp
to:
01-Antares_-_Xibalba.mp3
so far I've used :
for var in *.mp3; do mv $var {var/"/}; done
and I could repeat that until I'm through, delete the 0x number and add one but I'd like to do it more efficient.
Could anyone give me a pointer (!not a script!) ?
I'd still like to write it myself but there's so much options that I'm a bit lost.
so far I thought to use this program flow:
read all the filenames containing .mp3 and declare as variable $var
strip $var from quotes
select 0x number, append delimiter _ (0x_)
move 0x_ to the beginning of the string
select remaining ' - - ' and change to '-'
done
which bash programs to use? especially changing the 0x puzzles me cuz I need a loop which increments this number and test if it is present in the filename variable and then it has to be changed.
It is easy to do in python 2.x. You can use this logic in any language you want.
import string
a=raw_input('Enter the name of song')
a=a.replace('"', "")
a=a.replace('.mp', ' .mp3')
words = a.split()
print words[2]+'-'+words[0]+'_-_'+words[4]+words[5]
Logic:
I removed ", then make .mp to .mp3, then splitted the string, which created a list ( array ) and then printed the elements according to need.
Try doing this :
rename -n 's/"(\w+)"\s+-\s*(\d+)\s*-\s*"(\w+)"\.mp/$2-$1_-_$3.mp3/' *mp
from the shell prompt. It's very useful, you can put some perl tricks like I does in a substitution.
You can remove the -n (dry-run mode switch) when your tests become valids.
There are other tools with the same name which may or may not be able to do this, so be careful.
If you run the following command (linux)
$ file $(readlink -f $(type -p rename))
and you have a result like
.../rename: Perl script, ASCII text executable
then this seems to be the right tool =)
If not, to make it the default (usually already the case) on Debian and derivative like Ubuntu :
$ sudo update-alternatives --set rename /path/to/rename
Last but not least, this tool was originally written by Larry Wall, the Perl's dad.

All files in one dir, linux

Today I tried a script in linux to get all files in one dir. It was pretty straightforward, but I found something interesting.
#!/bin/bash
InputDir=/home/XXX/
for file in $InputDir'*'
do
echo $file
done
The output is:
/home/XXX/fileA /home/XXX/fileB
But when I just input the dir directly, like:
#!/bin/bash
InputDir=/home/XXX/
for file in /home/XXX/*
do
echo $file
done
The output is:
/home/XXX/fileA
/home/XXX/fileB
It seems, in the first script, there was only one loop and all the file names were stored in the variable $file in the FIRST loop, separated by space. But in the second script, one file name was stored in $file just in one loop, and there were more than one loop. What is exactly the difference between these two scripts?
Thanks very much, maybe my question is a little bit naive..
The behavior is correct and "as expected".
for file in $InputDir'*' means assign "/home/XXX/*" to $file (note the quotes). Since you quoted the asterisk, it will not be executed at this time. When the shell sees echo $file, it first expands the variables and then it does glob expansion. So after the first step, it sees
echo /home/XXX/*
and after glob expansion, it sees:
echo /home/XXX/fileA /home/XXX/fileB
Only now, it will execute the command.
In the second case, the pattern /home/XXX/* is expanded before the for is executed and thus, each file in the directory is assigned to file and then the body of the loop is executed.
This will work:
for file in "$InputDir"*
but it's brittle; it will fail, for example, when you forget to add a / to the end of the variable $InputDir.
for file in "$InputDir"/*
is a little bit better (Unix will ignore double slashes in a path) but it can cause trouble when $InputDir is not set or empty: You'll suddenly list files in the / (root) folder. This can happen, for example, because of a typo:
inputDir=...
for file in "$InputDir"/*
Case matters on Unix :-)
To help you understand code like this, use set -x ("enable tracing") in a line before the code you want to debug.
The difference is the quoting of '*'. In the first case the loop only executes once, with $file equal to /home/XXX/* which then expands to all the files in the directory when passed to echo. In the second case it executes once per file, with $file equal to each file name in turn.
Bottom line - change:
for file in $InputDir'*'
to:
for file in $InputDir*
or, better, and to make it more readable - change:
InputDir=/home/XXX/
for file in $InputDir'*'
to:
InputDir=/home/XXX
for file in $InputDir/*

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