Re: OT: shell scripts and spaces in file/folder names

[Ron Johnson <ron.l.johnson@cox.net>]

On Thu, 2003-04-17 at 14:16, Joris Huizer wrote:
> Hello everybody,
> 
> I'm trying to learn to write shell scripts... but I
> have a problem: I've got some files which have spaces
> in their names (yeah I know it's ugly... but it'll be
> some searching to find those)
> 
> Those files kill many of the shell scripts - some of
> them go through all files in the given directory,
> like:
> 
> for i in `ls .`
> do
>   #...
> done
> 
> Can anybody tell me how I can make this work even
> though I have filenames with spaces ? 

Yet another method:

  $ touch "foo bar"
  $ touch "foo snafu"
  $ for f in "`ls -1 | grep ' '`";
  > do
  >     echo "$f"
  > done
  foo bar
  foo snafu

Note the *2* pair of double quotes, and the pair of "back quotes".

However, you should learn perl or python.  I really like python, but
perl is ubiquitous...

Here's a script I use to change files with spaces to dashes.


  #!/usr/bin/perl
  use warnings;
  use strict;
  my $fn;
  my $nn;
  chdir ("/dir/with/spaces");
  opendir(DIRHANDLE,".");
  while ($fn = readdir(DIRHANDLE))
  {
      if ($fn =~ / /)
      {
          $nn = $fn;
          $nn =~ s/ /-/g;
          rename("$fn", $nn);
      }
  }
  closedir(DIRHANDLE);

Gurus can do it in far fewer, but more cryptic lines, but I like
this way.

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