On Fri, May 14, 2004 at 11:18:32PM +0300, robin wrote:
I'm trying to write a bash script that will recurse through a directory, find Word files, then run antiword on them. Unfortunately, I'm stuck on the first stage, which is to get it to recognise a directory. I'd thought this would work
for i in *
do
if [-d $i]; then
cd $i
and so on, but the third line obviously has the wrong syntax, as I get "[!: command not found". Any ideas?
find can be your friend. You can find directories and files, and specify recursion depth using -mindepth and -maxdepth. So an easy solution (depending on what you want to do with what you find) could be something like
find /home/robin/crappywordfiles -type f -iname '*.doc'
by default it will recurse crappywordfiles to infinity finding all files
that end in .doc, .DOC, .dOC etc.
or if you really wanna cd to the directories themselves, something like
for i in `find /home/robin/crappywordfiles -type d` do cd $i rm -f *.doc done
Works a treat!
The reason I'm messing around with evil Word files is that it is the format I usually receive essays in (I've tried teaching my students the "save as" function in Word, but it doesn't sink in, and besides, other formats that Word can produce are equally problematic). It's not normally a problem, since I can open them in OpenOffice, write my comments and post them back, but sometimes I also want to do some analysis on them, for which plain text is essential (see http://lists.bilkent.edu.tr/~robin/cgibin/concord.cgi for something I did a few years back).
Thanks a lot,
Sir Robin
-- “Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.” - Voltaire
Robin Turner IDMYO Bilkent Universitesi Ankara 06533 Turkey
www.bilkent.edu.tr/~robin
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