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eRJe	10-27-2013 02:42 PM

script to timestamp files with timestamp from directory

If I want to change the timestamp for files and use the timestamp from the directory that contains these files. For this I can use:

Code:

touch -r ./<directory-XYZ> ./<directory-XYZ/*>

Now I need to do this for a few hundred directories...

I'm trying to create a little script but I got stuck very quickly :-) I'm having trouble reading the directories because they contain spaces and special characters ie "[" and "(".

Something very basic like this doesn't work because the "\" in front of each special character is missing.

Code:

ls -d1 */ | while read DIRNAME

do

    ls ${DIRNAME}

done

I'm not a frequent script writer and probably because of that I always get stuck between the syntax of bash, csh, ksh etc. I'm always confusing the " ' ` Maybe I'm using the wrong syntax here or should I go with a different approach? I started with find . -type d -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 but it gave me the same troubles.

Firerat

10-27-2013 03:16 PM

unstested, but

Code:

ls "${DIRNAME}"

and you don't need ls, at all
or even while read

just at straight for loop will do it

Code:

for dir in */;do

    ls "${dir}"

done

the important part is the double quotes

edit:
http://mywiki.wooledge.org/ParsingLs

why ls is bad in scripts

eRJe	10-28-2013 04:58 PM

@Firerat,

Thanks for the hint. And thanks for the link you added. I will take a closer look at it later. For now the quick fix I needed was done by the following µ script. I had to use a slightly different approach as the directories were also containing subdirectories and the touch command didn't have a recursive option.

Quote:

for dir in */;do
find "${dir}" -exec touch -r "${dir}" "${dir}"/* {} \;
done

exit

I'm sure this could have been done in several ways, perhaps better then in this example. I'm open for comments so that I can learn...

SAbhi

10-28-2013 11:20 PM

Code:

find "${dir}" -exec touch -r "${dir}" "${dir}"/* {} \;

You don't have to use "find" when you are already inside the parent directory and have variable $dir containing the directory name you need, all you need to do is what you specified after -exec.

cheers

eRJe	11-13-2013 06:52 PM

Hi SAhbi,

Thanks for answering, sorry I took so long to respond.

I'm not sure if I understand. I used the find cmd to find any files in $dir (possibly in multiple subdirectories) and then execute the touch cmd on those files. I use $dir as date reference.

How do you suggest I should envoke the cmd string without find?

Regards,
Robbert

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