CODEWITHSUNDEEP
sed
Hariprasath
Hariprasath

Reputation: 539

Using sed throws No such file or directory

I am very new to shell script and trying to learn it.

My use case with Shell script is that I need to replace a particular string with an empty string on all the files content which are inside a folder. The following is my folder structure.

-> RootFolder
   -> applications
       -> a.app
   -> layout
       -> Account-Service Plus Account Layout.layout
       -> Address-Service Plus Address Layout.layout
   -> classes
       -> A.cls
       -> B.cls

I am getting below error on files which has the name with spaces. Can anyone point me what I have missed over there?

../RootFolder/layouts/Account-Service
sed: can't read ../RootFolder/layouts/Account-Service: No such file or directory
Plus
sed: can't read Plus: No such file or directory
Account
sed: can't read Account: No such file or directory
Layout.layout

My script is,

for d in $(find ../RootFolder -maxdepth 2 -type f)
do
  echo "$d"
  sed -i "s/test/''/g" "$d"
done

Upvotes: 1

Views: 3495

Answers (1)

Renaud Pacalet
Renaud Pacalet

Reputation: 29050

If you have spaces in your file names (which is not a very good idea if you want to automate your processing) you must code everything with this in mind.

for d in $(find ../RootFolder -maxdepth 2 -type f)

will treat each space-separated word independently, even if they are parts of the same file name. A more robust solution consists in using the -print0 option of find, that uses the null character as output separator, and write your loop such that it also uses the null character as the separator:

find ../RootFolder -maxdepth 2 -type f -print0 | \
while IFS= read -r -d '' d; do
  echo "$d"
  sed -i "s/test/''/g" "$d"
done

The read command is used with:

  • IFS= (empty Input Field Separator) to preserve leading and trailing spaces,
  • the -r option to preserve backslashes and
  • the -d '' option to use the null character as the word separator.

With this, find can output any crazy file names, they should be passed to the while loop in the d shell variable, unmodified and one at a time... Unless your file system allows null characters in file names (I don't know any such file system but I don't know them all).

Upvotes: 2

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