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Accepted
Strae
Asked: 2010-11-11 01:59:28 +0800 CST

Whitespaces error while coping files

  • 772

my needs is to copy all files and folders of a "master" folder into all the usb keys mounted.

So, i wrote this code:

for usb_key in `ls /media/`;
    do
        for file in `ls -a /home/daniele/USB/MASTER`;
            do
                cp /home/daniele/USB/MASTER/"$file" /media/$usb_key/"$file"
            done;
    done;

for usb_key in `ls /media`;
    do
        umount /media/$usb_key
    done;
#alert me that the work is done
totem /home/daniele/USB/0016.mp3 &
exit

But, if i have a folder named "DO NOT DELETE" into /home/daniele/USB/MASTER, this throw an error becose of the filenames.

So, how can i do solve that? There is a way to replace all the whitespaces in the $file var with \?

command-line duplicate-files

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    What about this? I don't know why you have to iterate each file and why you can't just copy the lot... But this should work slightly better than by parsing ls's output.

    for usb_key in /media/*;
do
    cp -Ra /home/daniele/USB/MASTER/* $usb_key
    umount /media/$usb_key
done;

#alert me that the work is done
totem /home/daniele/USB/0016.mp3 &
exit

    Just to explain what's happening, for breaks on all spaces when parsing external input (as it was with your code). You can see that in operation by going to a directory with spaced files in and running:

    for file in `ls -1`; do echo $file; done

    In my TV directory, I see output like:

    The
Big
Bang
Theory
The
Cleveland
Show
The

    I think there is a way to change the break sequences but it's just easier to use bash's native file-finding syntax. Or use find ... -exec ... which is very powerful itself.

    • 2