Copying files with spaces in them

[Chris F.A. Johnson]

On Wed, 28 Jan 2009, Aviss,Tyler wrote:

> Wouldn't that still break on the spaces? If you have a file like "main 
> data.dat", you will end up with two values of $file being:
> main
> data.data

     No. Wildcards are expanded to filenames, no matter what characters
     the names contain.

     For example, try this in an empty directory:

touch a.txt "a b.txt" "c d.txt" "e f.txt" q.txt
printf "FILE: %s\n" *.txt


> While I agree that spaces may not be a good idea in general for many cases, 
> how to make allowances for them in shell scripts?
>
>
> On 28-Jan-09, at 6:04 PM, "Chris F.A. Johnson" <cfaj-uVmiyxGBW52XDw4h08c5KA at public.gmane.org> wrote:
>
>> On Wed, 28 Jan 2009, Christopher Browne wrote:
>> 
>>> I've got a Makefile that is trying to copy man pages into place;
>>> unfortunately, since they are (somewhat legitimately) created with
>>> spaces in them,
>>
>>  There's NO excuse for that.
>> 
>>> the following breaks:
>>>
>>>      for file in $(wildcard man1/*) ; do \
>>>        $(INSTALL_DATA) $$file $(DESTDIR)$(mandir)/man1 || exit;\
>>>     done
>>>     for file in $(wildcard man7/*) ; do \
>>>       $(INSTALL_DATA) $$file $(DESTDIR)$(mandir)/man7 || exit;\
>>>     done
>>> 
>>> I'll bet Chris Johnson would have a better idiom he could suggest offhand 
>>> ;-).
>>
>>   A makefile is not a shell script. In a shell script, I would use:
>> 
>> for file in man1/*
>> do
>>  cp "$file" "$DESTDIR/$mandir"/man1 || exit
>> done
>> 
>> --
>>  Chris F.A. Johnson, webmaster         <http://woodbine-gerrard.com>
>>  ========= Do not reply to the From: address; use Reply-To: ========
>>  Author:
>>  Shell Scripting Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach (2005, Apress)
>> --
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-- 
    Chris F.A. Johnson, webmaster         <http://woodbine-gerrard.com>
    ========= Do not reply to the From: address; use Reply-To: ========
    Author:
    Shell Scripting Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach (2005, Apress)
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists