scripts for batch treatment

[Bernard <bdebreil@teaser.fr>]

Hi to Everyone !

I intend to copy a number of files chosen from a given directory. At 
first, I've made a mistake : instead of deleting unwanted files from a 
copy of said directory, I worked on deleting lines on a filelist that I 
had extracted
using 'ls -l > filename.txt'. This sorting job, on about 12,500 lines, 
took several hours of my time, and I hope to find a way to make use of 
the result obtained, rather than re-doing the whole sorting job. The 
sorted files number about 400 or so. Had it been only 2 or 3 dozens of 
files, I would not have hesitated repeating the following command for 
each file :

cp 
/mnt/exthd/home/bd/office52/user/desktop/etc/etc/filename_pasted_from_the_list 
/home/mydir

But 400 files are too many, and I expect to be able to treat this, using 
some sort of a shell script suitable for batch treatment...

A similar problem had occured to me 3 or 4 years ago for batch treatment 
of a series of picture files, and I had managed with a short Free Pascal 
routine using a 'for n=x to y do" loop, this being made possible by the 
fact that filenames were made of a rising set of numeric values, which 
is not the case for my new problem. Filenames are indeed made of long 
strings of characters since they are "subjects" of e-mails received via 
StarOffice 5.1 and 5.2.

Thanks in advance for any hint.

P.S. I know nothing about shell scripts, so I might need a good tutorial 
on this.



Bernard