Newbie Bash script help

Mikecore · 05-12-2008, 09:14 PM

I'm new to bash scripting so be kind. I'm trying to write a script to batch process a bunch of pdf files through the tool "pdftk" here is what I have so far.

Code:

#!/bin/bash

find *.pdf | pdftk *.pdf input_pw password output open_*.pdf; if [ "$?" != 0 ]; then *.pdf >> fail.txt }

problem is this doesn't work it loads the files but fails the conversion. and when I run the same commmand on just one file it works fine.

Code:

pdftk file_name.pdf input_pw password output open_file_name.pdf

eggixyz · 05-12-2008, 09:45 PM

Hey there,

I think there might be a couple reasons why you're having issues with the multiple conversions (I'll be kind

This code:

Code:

find *.pdf | pdftk *.pdf input_pw password output open_*.pdf; if [ "$?" != 0 ]; then *.pdf >> fail.txt

would change to this (keeping it relatively the same) and easy to read, versus less efficient

Code:

find . -name "*.pdf" |sed -e 's/\.pdf//' -e 's/^\.\///'| while read x; do pdftk ${x}.pdf input_pw password output open_$x.pdf; if [ "$?" != 0 ]; then echo ${x}.pdf >> fail.txt;fi;done

This more convoluted than it needs to be, but, hopefully walks you through the process better. Take the output from the find command (changed to specify the current directory and quote the found filenames to avoid system globbing (*) reading anything from your current directory), process it with sed to remove the extraneous beginning ./ and ending .pdf from each filename, then pump that to a while loop where you run your pdftk command. In that while loop you run your if-conditional to check and see if it worked, with an ending "fi" to close the if loop and a "done" to close the while loop when you're done processing pdf's

Hope that helps and is easier to understand than it was to explain

, Mike

chrism01 · 05-12-2008, 11:38 PM

If you're doing a numeric comparison here:

if [ "$?" != 0 ]

that should be

if [[ $? -ne 0 ]]

http://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/tes...ml#DBLBRACKETS
http://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/comparison-ops.html

eggixyz · 05-13-2008, 11:23 AM

True,

Good catch. I missed that.

The curse of knowing too many scripting languages

, Mike