I have been trying to learn a little bash programming. I was trying to write a script for work, part of which involved handling all jpg files in a directory. My script falls over when the files it is trying to process have spaces in the filenames. I cannot find a way around but I realise that there must be one. This is what I have tried:

#!/bin/sh
SOURCEDIR='/path/to/sourcedir/'
DESTDIR='/path/to/destdir'
cd $SOURCEDIR
for i in `ls *.jpg`
do
cp $i $DESTDIR
done

This works fine unless any of the filenames have spaces so I tried:

#!/bin/sh
SOURCEDIR='/path/to/sourcedir/'
DESTDIR='/path/to/destdir'
cd $SOURCEDIR
for i in `ls -Q *.jpg`
do
cp $i $DESTDIR
done

This also doesn't work. I have tried putting quotes around various different pars but without success. What am I doing wrong?

for i in *.jpg; do cp "$i" /path/to/destdir; done

That should do it. This is basically what you have, just quoting the $i variable, and suited for the shell instead of a script file (you need to be in sourcedir of course).

better yet is to convert all your filenames containing spaces to use underscores. You can try this in the directory with the space names:

#!/bin/bash

ls | while read each
do
echo "$each" | grep "\ " >/dev/null 2>&1
if [ $? -eq 0 ]
then
newname=`echo "$each" | tr ' ' '_'`
mv "$each" $newname
echo "Renamed \"$each\" to $newname"
fi

done