I am new to Bash.
I would like to write a script which has three variables:
The old file name
The new file name
The name of a directory to move the file to
I'm trying to change the name of the file and move it into the directory.
I know that using mv can change the name and to move it to other directory.
I know how to do it using commands that I just type in the terminal but I have some trouble to use variables in those commands. The directory is located in the same location as the file and I run the script from there.
Example:
old_file="abc"
new_file="cba"
dir="yyy"
Result: No more file called abc in ., but there is a file called cba in ./yyy witch contains the same information that abc had.
Basically you need to invoke the mv command using the script variables. Notice that the variables are between double quotes to avoid bash splitting the names when finding spaces or other special characters.
#!/bin/bash
old_file=$1
new_file=$2
dir=$3
mv "$old_file" "$dir"/"$new_file"
And you should invoke it as:
./script "abc" "cba" "yyy"
Finally, notice that the file "abc" must exist in the current directory (the one where the script is), and the folder "yyy" must also exist in the current directory (or be an absolute path).
I just during the weekend decided to try out zsh and have a bit of fun with it. Unfortunately I'm an incredible newbie to shell scripting in general.
I have this folder with a file, which filename is a hash (4667e85581f80b6936f8811f0a7493c70eae4ee7) without a file-extension.
What I would like to do is copy this file to another folder and rename it to "screensaver.png".
I've tried with the following code:
#!/usr/bin/zsh
KUVVA_CACHE="$HOME/Library/Containers/com.kuvva.Kuvva-Wallpapers/Data/Library/Application Support/Kuvva"
DEST_FOLDER="/Library/Desktop Pictures/Kuvva/$USERNAME/screensaver.png"
for wallpaper in ${KUVVA_CACHE}; do
cp -f ${wallpaper} ${DEST_FOLDER}
done
This returns the following error:
cp: /Users/Morten/Library/Containers/com.kuvva.Kuvva-Wallpapers/Data/Library/Application Support/Kuvva is a directory (not copied).
And when I try to echo the $wallpaper variable instead of doing "cp" then it just echo's the folder path.
The name of the file changes every 6 hour, which is why I'm doing the for-loop. So I never know what the name of the file will be, but I know that there's always only ONE file in the folder.
Any ideas how I can manage to do this? :)
Thanks a lot!
Morten
It should work with regular filename expansion (globbing).
KUVVA_CACHE="$HOME/Library/Containers/com.kuvva.Kuvva-Wallpapers/Data/Library/Application Support/Kuvva/"
And then copy
cp -f ${KUVVA_CACHE}/* ${DEST_FOLDER}
You can add the script to your crontab so it will be run at a certain interval. Edit it using 'crontab -e' and add
30 */3 * * * /location/of/your/script
This will run it every third hour. First digit is minutes. Star indicates any. Exit the editor by pressing the escape-key, then shift+: and type wq and press enter. These vi-commands.
Don't forget to 'chmod 0755 file-name' the script so it becomes executable.
Here is the script.
#!/bin/zsh
KUVVA_CACHE="$HOME/Library/Containers/com.kuvva.Kuvva-Wallpapers/Data/Library/Application Support/Kuvva"
DEST_FOLDER="/Library/Desktop Pictures/Kuvva/$USERNAME/screensaver.png"
cp "${KUVVA_CACHE}/"* "${DEST_FOLDER}"
I have a text file fold.txt that contains one line fold_nam:
$ cat fold.txt
fold_nam
This name in the the text file is an output that was created during a program run of a folder's name that now contains other files that I need to work with.
I am writing a big script and now I need to enter this folder and I need to get the name from the text file. I tried several things but cannot really work it out.
There's no need to use cat:
cd $(<fold.txt)
If you want to read the line into a variable: read -r folder_name < fold.txt
You should be able to do this:
cd $(cat fold.txt)
or
cd `cat fold.txt`
I am trying to create a script that runs an another script and changes the name from the output.
Here is the script so far:
#! /bin/bash
i=1
for N in mediainput.iso mediainput2.iso
do
x264transcode $N
mv $N $((i++))
done
This don`t that well. It just moves the files and renames them.
I need to first run the x264transcode and then rename the output of that. Since they all get the same name when x264transcode as processed the files.
Its okey that the name the files are changed to are 1 then 2 and so on.
But it would be a plus if there where a method of getting the name of the folder the file was inside or the file itself. Maybe choosing between them for different scenarios.
Example below:
~/Videos/Summer Vacation 2009/dvd.iso
Output from x264: VIDEO01.mkv
Output from rename script: Summer-Vacation-2009.mkv
Does x264transcode always call its output VIDEO01.mkv? Are all the video files dvd.iso? If so, something like this, to also get the correct filename with hyphens:
cd ~/Videos
for I in */dvd.iso
do
x264transcode $I
mv VIDEO01.mkv `dirname $I|tr ' ' -`.mkv
end
This is assuming x264transcode stores VIDEO01.mkv in the current directory rather than the directory its input file is located in.
To create a playlist for all of the music in a folder, I am using the following command in bash:
ls > list.txt
I would like to use the result of the pwd command for the name of the playlist.
Something like:
ls > ${pwd}.txt
That doesn't work though - can anyone tell me what syntax I need to use to do something like this?
Edit: As mentioned in the comments pwd will end up giving an absolute path, so my playlist will end up being named .txt in some directory - d'oh! So I'll have to trim the path. Thanks for spotting that - I would probably have spent ages wondering where my files went!
The best way to do this is with "$(command substitution)" (thanks, Landon):
ls > "$(pwd).txt"
You will sometimes also see people use the older backtick notation, but this has several drawbacks in terms of nesting and escaping:
ls > "`pwd`.txt"
Note that the unprocessed substitution of pwd is an absolute path, so the above command creates a file with the same name in the same directory as the working directory, but with a .txt extension. Thomas Kammeyer pointed out that the basename command strips the leading directory, so this would create a text file in the current directory with the name of that directory:
ls > "$(basename "$(pwd)").txt"
Also thanks to erichui for bringing up the problem of spaces in the path.
This is equivalent to the backtick solution:
ls > $(pwd).txt
To do literally what you said, you could try:
ls > `pwd`.txt
which will use the full pathname, which should be fine.
Note that if you do this in your home directory, which might
be in /home/hoboben, you will be trying the create /home/hoboben.txt,
a text file in the directory above.
Is this what you wanted?
If you wanted the directory to contain a file named after it, you would get
the basename of the current directory and append that with .txt to the pwd.
Now, rather than use the pwd command... why not use the PWD environment variable?
For example:
ls > $PWD.txt
or
ls > ${PWD}.txt
is probably what you were trying to remember with your second example.
If you're in /home/hoboben and you want to create /home/hoboben/hoboben.txt, try:
ls > ${PWD}/${PWD##*/}.txt
If you do this, the file will contain its own name, so most often, you would remedy this in one of a few ways. You could redirect to somewhere else and move the file or name the file beginning with a dot to hide it from the ls command as long as you don't use the -a flag (and then optionally rename the resulting file).
I write my own scripts to manage a directory hierarchy of music files and I use subdirectories named ".info", for example, to contain track data in some spare files (basically, I "hide" metadata this way). It works out okay because my needs are simple and my collection small.
I suspect the problem may be that there are spaces in one of the directory names. For example, if your working directory is "/home/user/music/artist name". Bash will be confused thinking that you are trying to redirect to /home/user/music/artist and name.txt. You can fix this with double quotes
ls > "$(pwd).txt"
Also, you may not want to redirect to $(pwd).txt. In the example above, you would be redirecting the output to the file "/home/user/music/artist name.txt"
The syntax is:
ls > `pwd`.txt
That is the '`' character up underneath the '~', not the regular single quote.
Using the above method will create the files one level above your current directory. If you want the play lists to all go to one directory you'd need to do something like:
#!/bin/sh
MYVAR=`pwd | sed "s|/|_|g"`
ls > /playlistdir/$MYVAR-list.txt
to strip all but the directory name
ls >/playlistdir/${PWD##/*}.txt
this is probably not what you want because then you don't know where the files are (unless you change the ls command)
to replace "/" with "_"
ls >/playlistdir/${PWD//\//_}.txt
but then the playlist would look ugly and maybe not even fit in the selection window
So this will give you both a short readable name and usable paths inside the file
ext=.mp3 #leave blank for all files
for FILE in "$PWD/*$ext"; do echo "$FILE";done >/playlistdir/${PWD##/*}.txt