LinuxQuestions.org - bach scripting and escape characters...

- Linux - Newbie (https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-newbie-8/)

- - bach scripting and escape characters... (https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-newbie-8/bach-scripting-and-escape-characters-203135/)

bach scripting and escape characters...

I am having some trouble with basck scripting...
I need to take a list of command line arguments and run a find on each of them. The problem is that some of them contains wild characters, and everytime I pass it to find, they are expanded according to the contents of the current directory.

Code:

# rmex "*.txt" -x "file*"

# put the first portion into the variable ${PATTERNS}

PATTERNS=`echo "$@" | awk 'BEGIN{ FS="-x " } {print $1 }'`

# debug says: PATTERNS=*.txt 

for var in PATTERNS

  `find ./ -name "${var}" -print`

#but here, debug says: find ./ -name "file.txt file2.txt" -print

I tried escaping *, but then the last line looks like:
find ./ -name "\*.txt" -print

So, how can I pass it in and have it read the * correctly?
I tried

Code:

export TESTER="*.txt"

find ./ -name "${TESTER} -print

# debug says: find ./ -name "*.txt" -print

and that worked fine, but I can seem to apply that to my bash script.
help would be much appreciated.

I'm not 100% sure I understand what you're trying to achieve ...

Code:

PATTERNS="`echo "$@" | awk 'BEGIN{FS="-x "}  {print $1 }'`"

# debug says: PATTERNS=*.txt 

for var in $PATTERNS

do

  find ./ -name "${var}" -print

done

Does this do what you expect?

Cheers,
Tink

Shell wildcard expansion will occur in your for loop statement. You could try changing $PATTERN to "$PATTERN", but that causes problems of its own. For instance, if you use more than one wildcard mask on the command line (e.g. rmex "*.txt" "*.c"), the double quotes will pass "*.txt *.c" as a single value into var. I don't know anything off the top of my head as a way around that.

Found what you need. There's a way to turn off pathname expansion. Use set -f to turn it off, and set +f to turn it back on. So, this should work for you:

Code:

#!/bin/bash



PATTERNS=`echo "$@" | awk 'BEGIN{ FS="-x " } {print $1 }'`



# Prevent pathname expansion

set -f



for var in ${PATTERNS}

do

  find ./ -name "${var}" -print

done



# Restore pathname expansion

set +f



exit 0