listing files without ls


Subject: listing files without ls
From: Mike Barsalou (mbarsalou@aidea.org)
Date: Tue May 07 2002 - 12:46:12 AKDT


While playing around with scripting, I ran across a trick I thought
worth sharing:

You can use:

echo m*

to do the same as:

ls m*

However, with the echo command, you will get back the m* if there are no
file names that match the expression. This is good because in a script
like this:

#!/bin/bash
filenames=`ls m*`
for foo in filenames;
  do
    echo $foo
  done

you would get an error of 'no such file or directory' from your script.
With the echo you would get 'm*'. So you could add a conditional like
this:

#!/bin/bash
filenames=`echo m*`
if [ "$filenames" == "m*"]
then
   for foo in filenames;
     do
      echo $foo
     done
else
   Echo "There aren't any"
fi

Just thought I would share.

Mike

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This archive was generated by hypermail 2a23 : Tue May 07 2002 - 12:45:22 AKDT