On Tue, Jan 05, 2010 at 02:00:31AM +0530, Foss User wrote:
> for file in `ls *.wav`
> do
> echo $file
> done
>
> Of course, this doesn't do what I need. The names are
> split wherever there are spaces.
>
> $ sh convert.sh
snip
> What is the right way to do this?
Aside from correctly quoting your variables (as others have
pointed out), you could also use a combination of find(1)
and xargs(1). This is a generally robust approach for files
which might have any number of awkward characters in the
names: spaces, unprintable characters, files beginning with
dashes (which programs might mistake/confuse for arguments),
etc.
Especially if you are doing some kind of encoding (as
convert.sh + .wav files suggests) and have a multi-core
system. In this situation, the '-P' argument to GNU xargs is
a nice feature for parallel execution. E.g.
$ find . -type f -name '*.wav' -print0 | xargs -r0 -n 1 -P 4 lame -S
Here find generates a list of files in the current directory
ending in '.wav', prints out a string with the filenames
embedded in it, separated by the NULL byte (so guaranteed
not to be part of a filename itself); xargs then takes this
string and splits it up into filenames, then, assuming there
is at least one argument, runs 'lame -S <file>' for each
file, four invocations at a time[1].
For renaming (to remove .wav from inside foo.wav.mp3, or to
remove the space characters to make files easier to handle),
you might like rename(1) from inside the perl package:
$ rename 's/ /_/g' *wav
$ rename 's/\.wav//' *mp3
[1] the exact number you want to use is a matter of
experimentation; number of cores - 1 might be good if
you want to guarantee CPU time to other tasks e.g.
interactive usage; I tend to use number of (cores * 2) -
1 i.e. 7 for a quad-core/hyper-threaded machine
--
Jon Dowland
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