Comments on: Bash Scripting Techniques

By: Owen

Owen — Mon, 19 May 2008 23:36:41 +0000

Yes, those techniques also work too.

@Heikki I always get confused the other way & I’m so used to typing that its no big deal.

I forgot to add another bash scripting technique. For looping over a file list. The best way I have found to do it is:
find . -iname “*” | while read $i; do echo $i; done;

It works for looping over the current directory of files and works with spaces.

Doing a for i in $(ls); do echo $i; done; does not provide the same results.

Any one else have any scripting techniques that they like to use?

By: Andrew

Andrew — Mon, 19 May 2008 15:28:54 +0000

Something like:
grep “string” file
works too, or more to my liking…to find all the files in all the subdirectories containing the string:

grep -r “string” *

By: Heikki Naski

Heikki Naski — Mon, 19 May 2008 07:26:49 +0000

Some people recommend that instead of this:
cat | grep -i match

you should use this:
grep -i match filename

and instead of this:
cat | sed ’s/FIND/REPLACE/’ > newfilename

use this:
sed ’s/FIND/REPLACE/’ > newfilename

It’s less typing and no need for another pipe.
I admit that I too often make the “mistake” of catting something to grep because I think that I want to put something in the stream and fish out something from there so it fits the mental pattern better.