Homework questions
 

I am writing a script from an assignment in my Linux class and I am having problems. Where can I post my script to get suggestions about what could be wrong

Hi, welcome to LQ!

And here's a good place.


Cheers,
Tink

find + -exec + if
 

so my homework is to find the jpg files in a folder specified by the user and move them to another folder with the date added to the filename. I have not gotten to the name change part. I need to fix this first.

this is my script and I am having an error " -exec missing argument"

#!/bin/bash
DATE=`date +%d-%m-%y`
dest= /home/me/homework/jpgfil

read -p " what directory do you want to search?" dir
echo " Listing directory content"
ls $dir
read -p "what type of file are you looking for?" tipo (this is just an extra question, it is not needed because he wants the script only for jpg files)

if ["$tipo"==jpg};
then
find $dir -name "*.jpg" -exec mv *.jpg $dest\;
elif echo "Extension not supported"
fi

The problem is the missing space between $dest and \;


May I suggest that you put code tags around your code?



Cheers,
Tink

What do you mean by code tags?,. I put left the space now I am getting.
" syntax error near unexpected token 'fi'

this probably isn't related to the problem you posted, but I think you want to use "\{\}" instead of "*.jpg" in your exec section.

I made that change in the -exec section "\{\}" instead of "*.jpg" but that did not stop th "fi" error

I think you need a newline between elif and the echo command, that should fix your fi problem.

You've got mismatched bracket/braces here

if ["$tipo"==jpg};

I leave the answer up to you, but you're close...

You need to use square braces instead of curly braces.

Late post, needed to reload the page.

Code tags make code easier to read by maintaining
proper formatting. To get code tags you put this
around the piece of code. See the effect below.

Sorry, no idea what "I put left the space" implies.

Lots of good tips there; here's some good links to bash programming tutorials/docs
http://rute.2038bug.com/index.html.gz
http://tldp.org/LDP/Bash-Beginners-G...tml/index.html
http://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/

One thing I'd recommend for debugging is
as the 2nd line of your script. It shows you exactly what bash is doing/trying to do in detail.

I would add that I am surprised your script gets as far as it does before presenting an error as the following:
This would cause the very first error. Like:

Also, don't use backticks, use $(command) instead. It nests easily and can't be confused with commas.

It only works with bash (not plain sh), but I see that you're using bash anyway.

Again, use $(command) (see my previous post).

There may not be spaces around the "=" sign.

Why are you putting spaces in front of the strings you're printing? And if they're intentional, why is there not one in the last line in the above snippet?

Always put quotes around variables that contain filenames, since otherwise it will be split into separate arguments if the filename has spaces.

The "[" syntax is not some kind of expression, it's a command. That means that there have to be spaces between the arguments. Also, it should be a square bracket at the end, and the semicolon is not needed since there already is a newline before the "then".

http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashPitfa...22.24foo.22.5D

Again, put quotes around variables that contain filenames. Anyway, there should be a space between "$dest" and "\;".

Also, what is will do is attempt to copy all "*.jpg" files in the current directory into "$dest" every time "find" comes across a matching file. I don't think that's what you want. Even if that's what you want, if a filename you want to copy happens to contain "{}", find will replace it with the current filename that it found.