Shell script help

[Kelly Dunlop]

On Wed, Oct 15, 2014 at 03:43:38PM +0100, Colin Law wrote:
> This is not strictly a Ubuntu issue but I hope someone will take pity
> on me.  I am trying to write a shell script (it is in ash rather than
> bash but I don't think that is an issue here) that is given a
> parameter that is a partial directory name and may have spaces in it.
> I will call it with something like
> 
> myscript "dir name"
> 
> In the script I want to do something like
> for f in /some/path/$1/*.txt
> do
>   blah blah
> done
> 
> but I can't work out out how to quote it so that it keeps the words of
> the parameter together but still expands the glob.  Google has failed
> to help me to find the right incantation to make it work.

Colin,

Just put the quotes round the part you don't want it to change ie:

for f in /some/path/"$1"/*.txt


I tried calling this script as myscript "dir name":

#!/bin/bash

echo /tmp/"$1"/*.txt

with a directory called /tmp/dir name containing one.txt, two.txt and three.txt
and it gives:

/tmp/dir name/one.txt /tmp/dir name/three.txt /tmp/dir name/two.txt

so it works on bash.  Can't test it on ash because I don't have it installed.

HTH
Kelly
> 
> Any help would be much appreciated.
> 
> Cheers
> 
> Colin
> 
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-- 
Kelly Dunlop
kelly at xyzzy.org.uk