Conduct a search or test -f over a path with spaces

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

I am organizing my music library on a NAS server. I want to print a list of all the directories that are missing the cover art (at least one or more jpeg file). I have successfully created a file with each line containing the path to each occurance of one or more .mp3 files. That path is also expected to have one or more files ending in .jpg or .JPG.

My input file strings look like this:

/c/mp3/Bad Company/Rough Diamonds
/c/mp3/Bad Company/Burnin' Sky

Most of the directory paths have one or more spaces in the directory, preventing me from testing for files with the .jpg extension, plus I have no idea how to do a case-intensive test. I will probably just have to perform two tests. I get a file not found error if I quote the entire string like:

"/c/mp3/Bad Company/Rough Diamonds"

After much searching, I decided I need to convert each path to this format"

/c/mp3/"Bad Company"/"Rough Diamonds"

If I can just get the path in the above format, I should be able to test for a jpg file with:

[ -f /c/mp3/"Bad Company"/"Rough Diamonds"/*.jpg" ]

I have tried using the IFS="/" with the bash read and also awk with the IFS="/". Both these methods continue to use the space (and /) as an IFS and I end up with 6 fields in the case with the above path.

I am running an old version of linux, 2.6.17.14ReadyNAS, but I could do this over nfs with a modern kernel and tools. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

2

Having spaces or tabs in the pathname of a directory does not prevent you from matching files in that directory as long as you use appropriate quotes.

The quoted pathnames:

/c/mp3/"Bad Company"/"Rough Diamonds"

and

"/c/mp3/Bad Company/Rough Diamonds"

should produce identical results, and if that is the pathname of a directory the pattern:

"/c/mp3/Bad Company/Rough Diamonds"/*.[jJ][pP][gG]

should expand to a list of the jpeg files in that directory (using a case insensitive match for the .jpg .

Note however, that this quoting needs to occur when you're typing pathnames into a shell script; not in a list of pathnames that you're reading from a file. If you put the quotes in the file containing a list of pathnames, the quotes become characters in the names of the directories rather than shell escapes that are discarded as part of quote expansion while processing command lines.

When you run the command:

printf "/c/mp3/Bad Company/Rough Diamonds/\n" | awk -F/ '{for(i=1;i<=NF;i++)printf("$%d=%s\n",i,$i)'

does indeed have six fields, but space is not a field delimiter. If you run that command you'll see that the 1st field and the 6th field are the empty strings on the input line before the 1st "/" and after the last "/", respectively, and that there is a space character in both the 4th and 5th fields.

The command you listed above:

[ -f /c/mp3/"Bad Company"/"Rough Diamonds"/*.jpg" ]

doesn't do what you want because it contains two and a half matched pairs of double quotes. The command:

[ -f "/c/mp3/Bad Company/Rough Diamonds/"*.[jJ][pP][gG] ]

(note that the asterisk is not quoted) will evaluate to FALSE if there aren't any jpeg files in that directory, will evaluate to TRUE if there is one jpeg file in that directory, and will give you a syntax error if there are two or more jpeg files in that directory.

It seems that you want something more like the command:

[ "$dir/*.[jJ][pP][gG]" != "$(echo "$dir"/*.[jJ][pP][gG])" ]

(note that the placement of the double quotes in this command is crucial) which evaluates to TRUE if there is at least one jpeg file in the directory named by $dir and to FALSE if there are no jpeg files in the directory named by $dir .

So, putting all of this together, if you have the list of directories you gave above in a file named dirs , the script:

#!/bin/ksh
while IFS="" read -r dir
do      if [ "$dir/*.[mM][pP]3" != "$(echo "$dir"/*.[mM][pP]3)" ]
        then    if [ "$dir/*.[jJ][pP][gG]" = "$(echo "$dir"/*.[jJ][pP][gG])" ]
                then    printf "jpeg file(s) missing in \"%s\"\n" "$dir"
                else    printf "Both mp3 and jpeg files are in \"%s\"\n" "$dir"
                fi
        else    printf "There are no mp3 files in \"%s\"\n" "$dir"
        fi
done < dirs
1 Like
3

Thank you very much. This works perfectly.