How to handle passing filenames with spaces and wildcards into bash scripts?

Greetings all,

I have done a fair amount of experimentation and Googling trying to find an
answer to this and was wondering if some of the bash-scripting gurus out
there could give me a hand.

I am trying to make a script that will accept a wildcard to match a bunch of
files and iterate over those absolute filenames; running the command once
per filename. It is fairly straight-forward to do so when the filesnames
don't have spaces but I haven't been able to find the magic combination that
doesn't treat every space as a list separator.
The closest I have gotten is to use the following script:

#!/bin/bash
find $* -print0 | xargs -0 -I % command_to_iterate_over %

If I type:
script "./path/to/filename*"
it seems to iterate over the list properly whether there are spaces in there
or not.

If I type:
script "./path/to/filename\ with\ spaces*"
or
script "./path/to/filename with spaces*"
find chops up the filename at each space and tries to find each part which
fails.

If I put quotes around the $*
find says that it cannot find ./path/to/filename\ with\ spaces*

If I replace "find $*" with "find . -name $*" that doesn't help since it
will start in the current directory (I want paths to be absolute) and won't
match since the path is not stripped out of $* and $* could have multiple
arguments.

I have failed in similar ways using both while and for loops too.

What am I missing here ... is there a better command than find to expand my
wildcard and pass them to xargs? You seem to need the null separator between
the filenames. Am I going to have to do some manual regex string parsing
(after learning how to do so) to preprocess the command line arguments? I
could probably do some crazy stuff with find, sed and grep ... I am just
checking if there is something obvious/standard that I am missing.

Does anyone have some bash magic for me that expands the wildcard and
bundles each filename in quotes to pass on to a command one at a time in a
simple manner?

Thanks in advance for any hints/help/pointers/tricks that you can provide.
/Mike
--
fedora-list mailing list
fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx
To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list

Relevant Pages

  • F$SEARCH() complications with mixed case filenames
    ... would involve using SET PROCESS/CASE and/or SET PROCESS/PARSE and ... Both parts of filename are lower case ... Throwing in a wildcard version number would simplify it a lot because ... just as with a DIR command where the wildcard version number is ...
    (comp.os.vms)
  • Re: Changing Uppercase filenames into Lowercase
    ... uppercase filename to a lowercase filename, ... foundfile = f$searchcommand line. ... Based on a command procedure by Willem Grooters which was ...
    (comp.os.vms)
  • Re: Pass command line file name parameter
    ... Then the document class has a copy of the filename, ... No need to access the original command line at all. ... want the user to see all the labels as they would be printed. ... filename or any other variable of your CWinApp class. ...
    (microsoft.public.vc.mfc)
  • Re: CStdioFile::Open gives error "No error occurred"
    ... I would avoid GetErrorMessage and just use FormatMessage on the error code itself, ... presume this is *not* the filename you planned to open, so why are you using m_lpCmdLine? ... there is a serious question here as to whether or not the command line has any ... Use the debugger, it is a very useful tool. ...
    (microsoft.public.vc.mfc)
  • Re: Cannot delete directory
    ... "Glenn" wrote in message ... > in a command window. ... >>window is a "normal" window. ... >>be a valid 8.3 filename - even if it has somehow been ...
    (microsoft.public.win2000.file_system)
Loading