CODEWITHSUNDEEP
awk
knk
knk

Reputation: 856

awk system command with spaces in parameters

I am trying to run the following to extract the text from all the pdfs

find *.pdf | awk '{system("pdftotext "$0)}'

but dang it some crazy person put spaces in file names, how can I deal with this smoothly?

Upvotes: 3

Views: 1110

Answers (1)

ghoti
ghoti

Reputation: 46856

What is awk's role in this? Perhaps you should let find execute things itself.

find . -name \*.pdf -exec /path/to/pdftotext {} \;

Or if you're really really stuck with assuming that filenames will be safe as stdout to find (which you've proven they are not simply by asking this question), then put the filenames in quotes. This will work:

find . -name \*.pdf -print | awk '{cmd=sprintf("pdftotext \"%s\"", $0);system(cmd);}'

Upvotes: 2

Related Questions