Escaping spaces in a variable

Ransak · 02-09-2008, 11:44 PM

Hi,

I've been working on a way to automatically convert some of my TiVo files with a shell script. I'm using tivodecode to accomplish the actual conversion from a .TiVo file to a .mpg file.

My problem is when a TiVo file arrives, it's full of spaces. For example:

Code:

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 388959059 Feb  2 18:03 Ask This Old House - Window pane; safety glass (Recorded Sun Mar 18 2007 06 30AM AETV).TiVo

I've written a simple script to convert this using tivodecode:

Code:

#!/bin/bash
cd /data/videos
for a in $(ls -1 *.TiVo) ; do tivodecode -o $a.mpg $a ; done

The problem appears to be the spaces in the file names. When they're read into the a variable, they aren't escaped correctly, so tivodecode fails.

How can I escape these properly in my shell script? Escaped properly, tivodecode works well. I'd like to keep the spaces (as heinous as they are) in the file name since this is what certain applications I'm using like.

Nylex · 02-09-2008, 11:53 PM

Use double quotes: for a in $(ls -1 *.TiVo) ; do tivodecode -o "$a".mpg "$a" ; done

Ransak · 02-10-2008, 12:05 AM

Thanks for the reply Nylex.

It doesn't work correctly, however.

Code:

linux:/data/videos # ./tconvert.sh
Ask: No such file or directory
This: No such file or directory
Old: No such file or directory
House: No such file or directory
Encryption by QUALCOMM ;)

It begins to convert the first video but the output is filename -.mpg . All files are written to this (and thus overwriting) the previous converted file. I won't go into how annoying it is to have a filename start with a dash

ghostdog74 · 02-10-2008, 01:54 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Nylex

Use double quotes: for a in $(ls -1 *.TiVo) ; do tivodecode -o "$a".mpg "$a" ; done

no need to use ls

Code:

for a in *.Tivo
do
    blah blah "$a" 
done