CODEWITHSUNDEEP
bashfilesystemscommand-line-interface
wizzfizz94
wizzfizz94

Reputation: 1556

How to make a new file for each directory in another folder using bash?

Say i have a file structure like so:

stuff/
  foo/
   foo1.txt
   foo2.txt
  bar/
   bar1.txt
other/

I'd like a bash command that finds all directories in the current directory in this case stuff/ and creates files with the names of these directories in another directory, in this case other/ with a desired extension eg. .csv.

The result would look like this:

stuff/
  foo/
   foo1.txt
   foo2.txt
  bar/
   bar1.txt
other/
  foo.csv
  bar.csv

Upvotes: 0

Views: 35

Answers (2)

Alexander
Alexander

Reputation: 533

Try this：

#! /bin/bash

function read_and_cp() {
    for file in `ls $1`
    do
        if [ -d $1/${file} ]; then
            touch $2/${file}.csv
            read_and_cp $1/${file} $2
        fi
    done
}

read_and_cp stuff other

Upvotes: 0

Thomas
Thomas

Reputation: 181745

The question is a bit light on the "what did you try" front, but I'll indulge you.

To list all directories, we can use find:

$ cd stuff
$ find . -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type d
./bar
./foo

We can pipe this into a while loop which uses read -r to extract each successive directory name into a variable, here dirname:

$ find . -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type d | while IFS="" read -r dirname; do echo $dirname; done
./bar
./foo

Finally, instead of echoing the directory name, we can run touch to create the file with the desired name:

$ find . -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type d | while IFS="" read -r dirname; do touch ../other/$dirname.csv; done
$ ls ../other
bar.csv  foo.csv

Alternative approach! Because there are many ways to skin a cat.

We can use ls -d */ to list all directories:

$ ls -d */
bar/  foo/

Then we use sed to strip off the / and add the path and file extension:

$ ls -d */ | sed 's#\(.*\)/#../other/\1.csv#'
../other/bar.csv
../other/foo.csv

Then we use xargs to run a touch for each of these filenames:

$ ls -d */ | sed 's#\(.*\)/#../other/\1.csv#' | xargs touch
$ ls ../other
bar.csv  foo.csv

Upvotes: 1

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