Adam Thompson writes:

I can't find what I'm looking for in the bash(1) manpage, hoping there's an easy answer...

I want to use a construct like for i in ~/path/*; do something $i && rm $i; done

which works great as long as there are files in ~/path/. However, when the directory is empty, I get: rm: cannot remove `/home/athompso/path/*': No such file or directory

which isn't quite what I want. The quick fix in this case is to use for i in ~/path/*; do [ -f $i ] && something $i && rm $i; done

but once again, that strikes me as inelegant and I can't remember OR find the better way to do it.

Anyone?

Thanks, -Adam

for i in `ls /path/to/dir`; do do something $i; rm $i; done;

If you need the power of regular expressions I would just use grep.. although the way you're using it doesn't look like its necessary. IE

for i in `ls /dev | grep tty`; do echo -n $i; done;

My last reply didn't go through ( I'm guessing due to the length. ) Hence the random blathering at 2AM to lengthen this one...

All the best, Robert Keizer

[sean@sergeant:~]$ mkdir /tmp/nothing [sean@sergeant:~]$ ls /tmp/nothing | while read A; do echo $A; done [sean@sergeant:~]$

Also gets around nasty "argument list too long" messages and doesn't need you to remember arcane syntax. $A is quotable if you have spaces in the filename.

Sean

On Tue, Jul 6, 2010 at 11:07 PM, Adam Thompson athompso@athompso.netwrote:

I can't find what I'm looking for in the bash(1) manpage, hoping there's an easy answer...

I want to use a construct like for i in ~/path/*; do something $i && rm $i; done

which works great as long as there are files in ~/path/. However, when the directory is empty, I get: rm: cannot remove `/home/athompso/path/*': No such file or directory

which isn't quite what I want. The quick fix in this case is to use for i in ~/path/*; do [ -f $i ] && something $i && rm $i; done

but once again, that strikes me as inelegant and I can't remember OR find the better way to do it.

Anyone?

Thanks, -Adam

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