Hi there --
I am having quite a time with a final project in my Unix shell scripting
course, and I'd love some help. Basically, I'm writing a script that
takes two parameters from the user, an alphanumeric character and a
directory. Then, my script has to find and list any subdirectories in the
user-defined directory which begin with the alphanumberic character. I
decided to go what I thought was a better route and used awk, instead of
listing out the files and examining them one by one. The section I am
having trouble with is this:
echo "ls -l $DIR | awk '\$1 ~ /^d/ && \$9 ~ /^$ALPHANUM/ {print \$9}'"
LIST=`ls -l $DIR | awk '\$1 ~ /^d/ && \$9 ~ /^$ALPHANUM/ {print \$9}'`
After this segment, I go through a for loop to list out the filenames
listed in $LIST. I put the echo print statement in there to figure out
what the computer thought it was getting, and put the backslashes in
everywhere because the shell was basically erasing the $1 and $9 awk field
numbers (I expect this was because it thought they were unfilled
arguments).
Anyway, what prints out is this, when I run the script with . as the
directory and L as the alphanum :
ls -l . | awk '$1 ~ /^d/ && $9 ~ /^L/ {print $9}'
This is the printout from the echo command. The problem is, nothing is
coming out from my LIST assignment and for loop.
Here we go -- details details! I pasted that exact echo onto the command
line, and it worked perfectly. I normally work in tcsh, so I ran sh
manually and tried the command again -- same good result. However, when
it runs in the script it does not work. From my debug, it looks like the
LIST variable never gets anything assigned to it.
Also, I pared down the command in the script to:
LIST=`ls -l $DIR | awk '{print \$9}'`
When I ran that, the script worked 'perfectly', listing out all the files
in my working directory.
So, if any of you out there know something about this, I would really
appreciate the help. I can't figure out where it is going wrong between
the command line and the script.
Thanks,
_Cat
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