> This is a newbie list right? [okay, good] I don't want to be too
> embarassed to ask a stuped question. Would someone be willing to
> explain what this does? I mean each character has significance, right?
> So what is it? This reminds me of the random characters thrown up on
> my screen after disconnecting from the old BBS.
or apl :)
Well, I'll take a stab at it - but I would think that there is a
cleaner way to write this.
> At 08:34 PM 8/22/2001 -0700, you wrote:
> > > for i in `ls /dirname | grep -e".+ .+"`; do mv $i `echo $i |
> > gawk '{ gsub(_, ,$0) }'` ; done
Well, the 'for i in ' ... construct is going to do something for every
member of the list. For instance:
for i in 'apple pear peach'
do
echo i ate a $i
done
Well, that would print out:
i ate a apple
i ate a pear
i ate a peach
So, the for iterates over lists, rather than taking on a series of
sequential values (as in basic and other programming languages).
Stuff in ` ` (back quotes) get interpreted and substituted right into
the command line. In other words, another process is going out and building
the list that the for is going to use. I'm not certain about the grep -e
" .+ .+" part - but it would appear the object is to get a list of files,
and ls -l returns a long list of those. One of course can simplify this to
for i in `ls` or eevn for i in *, which returns all files in the directory -
try 'echo *' at your shell sometime.
So, if we simplify the first construct, it is going to present a new
filename from the directory and iterate over the full list of files, so
something will be done to each file name. The something is in the next
line - the 'mv $i `...` part. Here we also have another use of backquotes:
the intent is to take the filename we're currently using ($i), and do some
awk processing on it. Using 'tr' would be far simpler :). The result of
the awk processing is then put on the command line, which becomes the
new filename for the 'mv' command.
> Dean
------------------------------------------------------------------------
David E. Fox Thanks for letting me
[EMAIL PROTECTED] change magnetic patterns
[EMAIL PROTECTED] on your hard disk.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft?
Go to http://wwww.mandrakestore.com
