[SOLVED] A script to copy files.

stf92 · 12-06-2010, 10:28 PM

It does surprise me. Seems a bit of an arcane to me.
If the # of filenames in LIST is N, I'd say, in post #14 the for is traversed N times, because I see the output includes N line terminators, output by the echo command. Hence control is transfered to first sentence in the loop just after echo printed |$i, this sentence being the echo sentence itself. It seems as if iteration had converted into recursion.

grail · 12-06-2010, 11:20 PM

No not nearly as exciting as you make it out to be

The inverted commas you have placed around "$LIST" has told the interpreter to preserve the whitespace.
So if you have the following scenario:

Code:

dir - u1.sh
    - u2.sh
    - u2 and 3.sh
    - u4.sh

Then by looking at the input in your script:

Code:

LIST="$(ls u*.sh)"

Here you expected the inverted commas to preserve the whitespace and hence each file above and its newline character have been concatenated together in the variable LIST.

Then when you use the following:

Code:

for i in "$LIST" ; do

Again you have used inverted commas so bash preserves all the whitespace and therefore places all the data into 'i'.
This of course then only has to run the for loop once and do a single echo.

stf92 · 12-08-2010, 10:08 AM

I see, I see. The fault in my reasoning was not seeing that newlines are whitespace too.

Reading bash's man page I discovered the trap DEBUG builtin command. In fact, there is a full set of debugging facilities. Thanks for your kind help.