I am quite stuck; I need to compress the content of a folder, where I have multiple files (extension .dat). I went for shell scripting.
So far I told myself that is not that hard: I just need to recursively read the content of the dir, get the name of the file and zip it, using the name of the file itself.
This is what I wrote:
for i in *.dat; do zip $i".zip" $i; done
Now when I try it I get a weird behavior: each file is called like "12/23/2012 data102 test1.dat"; and when I run this sequence of commands; I see that zip instead of recognizing the whole file name, see each part of the string as single entity, causing the whole operation to fail.
I told myself that I was doing something wrong, and that the i variable was wrong; so I have replaced echo, instead than the zip command (to see which one was the output of the i variable); and the $i output is the full name of the file, not part of it.
I am totally clueless at this point about what is going on...if the variable i is read by zip it reads each single piece of the string, instead of the whole thing, while if I use echo to see the content of that variable it gets the correct output.
Do I have to pass the value of the filename to zip in a different way? Since it is the content of a variable passed as parameter I was assuming that it won't matter if the string is one or has spaces in it, and I can't find in the man page the answer (if there is any in there).
Anyone knows why do I get this behavior and how to fix it? Thanks!
You need to quote anything with spaces in it.
zip "$i.zip" "$i"
Generally speaking, any variable interpolation should have double quotes unless you specifically require the shell to split it into multiple tokens. The internal field separator $IFS defaults to space and tab, but you can change it to make the shell do word splitting on arbitrary separators. See any decent beginners' shell tutorial for a detailed account of the shell's quoting mechanisms.
Related
I am writing an mIRC script for a bot account to read a random line of text from a text file when a user keys in !read. As of now, when any user types !read, absolutely nothing happens. I have other commands set to work on TEXT commands, but this one seems to be the most puzzling, as I'm referencing a document rather than putting everything into the script itself.
on *:TEXT:!text:#: {
$read(C:\Program Files (x86)\mIRC\8Ball.txt,n)
}
My file is titled 8Ball.txt. What could be going wrong here?
Got it.
echo -a $read(C:\Users\Christopher\Desktop\8Ball.txt,n)
Changing the directory ended up doing it...it wasn't liking the location for some reason...I either blame me putting a / in front of echo, or I blame the space in Program Files (x86)
Your best move is to use the relative mIRC dir identifier $mircdir combing it with $qt which adds enclosing quotes.
$qt($+($mircdir,8Ball.txt))
Output:
"C:\Program Files (x86)\mIRC\8Ball.txt"
This way, you won't need to wonder why the script break when you changed the mIRC directory a year after.
I'm trying to use diff3 in this way
diff3 options... mine older yours
My problem is that I probably can't use it, since all my 3 files contain a "dash" within.
The manual mentions:
At most one of these three file names may be `-', which tells diff3 to read the standard input for that file.
so I probably have to rename filenames before running diff3.
If you know for a better solution or a workaround, please let me know about. Thank you!
At most one of these three file names may be `-', which tells diff3 to read the standard input for that file.
It does not state, that your filenames should not contain dash symbols. It simply says, that if you want to, you can put - instead of one of the names, in which case the standard input will be read instead of reading one of the files.
So, you can have as many dashes in your filenames as you like and diff3 should work just fine.
However, on Windows putting filenames in "" for escaping space characters does not work, and I failed to find a suitable workaround. However, you can automatize the process of renaming files (if the files are relatively small, this would not even be too inefficient):
#echo off
copy %1 tempfile_1.txt
copy %2 tempfile_2.txt
copy %3 tempfile_3.txt
"C:\Program Files (x86)\KDiff3\bin\diff3.exe" -E tempfile_1.txt tempfile_2.txt tempfile_3.txt
del tempfile_1.txt tempfile_2.txt tempfile_3.txt
Put this in a file like diff3.cmd, then run diff3.cmd "first file.txt" "second file.txt" "third file.txt".
P.S. Moving files would be more efficient (if they are on the same disk volume as the script, which they are not in your case), you could even move them back to where they were initially, but for some time they would not be present at their original folder.
I have an unusual requirement. I have a big config /perl file in which I would like to change the value of one variable before my run. To avoid manually finding the variable and changing it's value, I would like to write a perl script to change the name of the variable. Is that possible to do this without parsing every single line of big perl file, creating a temporary copy and overwriting old file.
Something is parsing this file at some point, right? Give it a list of things to substitute and you can have it only do the substitutions when it needs it. This avoids a big pre-startup overhead and if the config file is sparsely used, will result in a faster overall run.
So just make the thing reading it look for certain patterns to substitute in and a file (or passed in on the command line or environment variables, or...) for the values it should use and go from there.
If you don't have control over the parser, then there's not much to do. You could one-time pre-process the config file to determine EXACTLY where the substitutions need to be and write a faster processor, since it won't have to do any string parsing for regular expressions, just moving a bunch of bytes as fast as your computer can move them to the new file with the substitutions in place.
I'm using Perl WWW::Mechanize package in order to fetch and process data from some websites. Usually my way of action is as follows:
Fetch a webpage
$mech->get("$url");
Save the webpage contents in a variable (BTW, I'm not sure if it's the right way to save this amount of text inside a scalar which, as far as I know, supposed to be used for a single value)
my $list = $mech->content();
Use a subroutine that I've created to write the contents of the variable to a text file. (The writetoFile subroutine includes few more features, like path and existing file validations..)
writeToFile("$filename.tmp","$path",$list);
Processing the text in a file created in the previous step by creating an additional file and save the processed content there (Then deleting the initial temporary file).
What I wonder about, is whether it is possible to perform the processing before storing the text in a file, directly inside the $list variable? The whole process is working as expected but I don't really like the logic behind it and it seems a bit inefficient as well, since I have to rewrite the same file multiple times.
EDIT:
Just to give a bit more information about what I'm actually after when I process the variable contents. So the data I fetch from the website in this case is actually a list of items separated by a blank line and the first line is irrelevant to me. So what I'm doing while processing this data is 2 things:
Remove the empty (CRLF) lines
Remove the first line if it includes a particular text.
Ideally I want to save the processed list (no blank spaces and first line removed) in a file without creating any additional files on the way. In order to save the file I would like to use the writeToFile sub (I wrote) since it also performs validation on whether such file already exists (If a file will be saved before final processing - the writeToFile will always rewrite the existing file).
Hope it makes sense.
You're looking for split. The pattern depends: use (?<=\n) split at a new line character and keep it. If that doesn't matter, use \R to include all sort of line breaks.
foreach my $line (split qr/\R/, $mech->content) {
…
}
Now the obligatory HTML-parsing-with-regex admonishment: if you get HTML source with Mechanize, parsing it line-by-line does not make much sense. You probably want to process the HTML-stripped text version of the document instead, or pass the HTML source to a parser such as Web::Query to declaratively get at the pieces you need.
I don't understand the behaviour of the COPY command when using a wildcard.
I have a single text file in C:\Source called mpt*.asm and I want to copy it to C:\Dest. This is needed from a batch script, and I can't be sure of the exact name of mpt*.asm (it may be mpt001.asm for example). The destination name should be exactly mpt.asm.
If I use:
COPY C:\Source\mpt*.asm C:\Dest\mpt.asm
The file file is copied, but has a extra (0x1A) character appended to the end of the file.
If I use:
COPY C:\Source\mpt*.asm C:\Dest\mpt.asm /B
I don't get this spurious character.
If I don't use a wildcard, I don't get the spurious character either. It seems unlikely there is a bug in COPY, but this behavior seems unexpected.
Is there a way of doing this copy without resorting to using /B?
I have never seen that before, but it does append an extra arrow character for me too.
You can work around the issue using xcopy instead.
echo f| xcopy C:\Source\mpt*.asm C:\Dest\mpt.asm
If you read copy /? it says
To append files, specify a single file for destination, but multiple files
for source (using wildcards or file1+file2+file3 format).
So by using a single filename as the the dest, and using a wildcard in the source, it may interpret that as appending, which may be what the extra character is for, but as you aren't appending anything you can see it.
I'm only guessing but that may explain it.