Fraser Campbell <fraser@wehave.net> [2003-01-04 21:51:21 -0500]:
> On January 4, 2003 09:20 pm, the fabulous Gerald V. Livingston II wrote:
>
> > Thank you. Took a couple of tries to get the syntax correct but I
> > ended up with this:
> >
> > if [ `ls *.jpg 2>/dev/null|wc -l` -gt 0 ]
> > then for i in *.jpg; do mmv "$i" `date +%s`-$a.jpg; a=a+1; done
> > fi
What does 'mmv' buy you over using the more standard 'mv' in this
example? Just curious. You were not using any of the mmv features
that I could tell here.
> If there were thousands of jpgs you'll probably still get a "too many
> arguments" error with that for loop. I usually do something like this:
>
> ls *.jpg | while read i; do
> mv "$i" `date +%s`-$a.jpg; a=a+1
> done
>
> If there are no files, no problem, if there are 10,000 files also no problem
> (although there might be a faster way?).
That works. I prefer 'xargs' myself. Consider this alternative, not
replacement, example. Also you do have the shell to help you out with
your unique name generation and I don't. (Of course I only have the
'echo' there for testing because I am paranoid that someone would cut
and paste this literally.) The {} is replaced with each name read
from standard input in turn.
find . -name '*.jpg' -print0 | xargs -r0 -i echo mv {} /path/to/there/
However, if this is a command that is run frequently as I seem to
recall the OP saying earlier in this thread then I would assume that
it would not be possible to get up to ARG_MAX and would do the simpler
for loop above.
Bob
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