CODEWITHSUNDEEP
bashargument-passing
user1470511
user1470511

Reputation: 349

Bash: iterating over argument files

This could be a simple answer, but after Googling around I might just have the terminology down so I have yet to find anything about what I am asking.

When accepting an argument such as /bin/*.txt how do you iterate through each of the files?

I have tried this:

for file in $2; do
    echo $file
done

The second argument ($2) has an input such as the /bin/*.txt but the echo only prints out 1 of the text files out of the 6 I have. Am I iterating through this incorrectly?

I have also tried using ls as such and it will not print out correctly either...

ls $2

Upvotes: 3

Views: 926

Answers (1)

kojiro
kojiro

Reputation: 77059

Unless the argument is quoted, the argument /bin/*.txt will be expanded before your script ever sees it. Thus, if the argument is still /bin/*.txt, you can be sure there are no files matching that glob. Otherwise, you'll have multiple arguments matching all the files that do match, and you can just use the arguments:

for file; do # equivalent to for file in "$@"
    echo "$file"
done

If you want the argument to be quoted, you'll have to expand it yourself. An array is a decent way to do this:

arg='/bin/*.txt'
files=( $arg )
for file in "${files[@]}"…

Upvotes: 7

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