Comments on: Bash Scripting Tip: processing filenames with spaces

by: Johan

Thu, 21 Aug 2008 05:48:13 +0000

All is fair in love and war, but why wont my script work? :(

It only iterates over the first occurance.

~/music/ $ find ./ -iname “*.flac” | while read I; do ffmpeg -ab 160k -i “$I” “$I.mp3″; mv “$I.mp3″ mp3/; done;

by: marc

Fri, 30 Mar 2007 09:46:14 +0000

Hi Pablo, that actually doesn’t work with file names or paths with spaces which is the reason for the post in the first place. Reading each line into a variable with the described method protects the spaces in path and file names. It would work if your paths/filenames don’t have spaces though.

Thanks.

by: Pablo

Fri, 30 Mar 2007 05:57:10 +0000

nice trick. find is nice because it has soo many options, but if all we need is a set of files matching a pattern,

find $pathtompgs -iname ‘*.mpg’ | while read I; do echo “$I”; done

could be replaced with:

for I in $pathtompgs/*.mpg; do echo “$I”; done

(bash can do some of the work)

by: fabe

Sat, 25 Feb 2006 10:44:52 +0000

Great!! Perfect, to pipe find into the loop. Tricky. Thanks.

by: marc

Wed, 25 Jan 2006 04:39:17 +0000

Hey Shawn,

I appreciate the comment! I’m glad it helped - that’s exactly why I wrote it up :)

by: Shawn Dowler

Wed, 25 Jan 2006 04:25:08 +0000

Thanks for this tip! I’d been agonizing over this for about 30 minutes until I found your site. Had I not it would have been trial and error all night until I got it right :)

by: marc

Sun, 16 Oct 2005 14:22:59 +0000

Thanks, fixed…

by: Darrell

Sun, 16 Oct 2005 12:01:48 +0000

You have a minor typo in your mp3 copying example: the first “$I” should just be “I”, as in your first example. So it should read:

find /path/to/files/ -iname “*mp3″ | \
while read I; do
cp -v –parent “$I” /backup/dir/
done