Dealing with spaces in file names in a shell script

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hi,

What's the best way to find all files under a directory - including ones with space - in order to apply a command to each of them. For instance I want get a list of files under a directory and generate a checksum for each file.

Here's the csh script:

#!/bin/csh

set files = `find $1 -name '*'`
foreach file ($files)
set checksum = `sum $file`

\# Ignore directories
if\($status == 0\) then 
     echo "$checksum $file"
endif

end

The problem with this is that if there are spaces in files, it doesn't work. Unfortunately csh is the only scripting language I sort of know. Is there a better way to do this?

Thank you in advance,
Sam

2

find $1 -name "*" -type f -exec sum {} \;

3

If this is on Linux (i.e. using the GNU utilities) try:

find $1 -type f -print0 | xargs -0 sum

-print0 tells it to use nulls to separate the filenames instead of line feeds, and the -0 option tells xargs to expect the input in that format.

If you don't have the GNU utilities handy, try this method:

find $1 -type f ; while read file ; do sum "$file" ; done

On a separate note, generally I would avoid using csh unless you have a good reason to use it.

4

I do have GNU tools and that worked very well. Thanks.

I was wondering if there's a way to print out just the checksums and not the pathnames. I have a huge number of files - and I want to keep the size of the checksum report to a minimum.

Thanks again,
Sam

5

Do you not need to know which file each checksum belongs to? You can easily just pull out the checksum column by adding | awk '{print $1}' to the pipeline.

Incidentally I would recommend using cksum or md5sum rather than sum, which has a very simplistic checksum algorithm.

6

Thanks for those tips. I tried cksum. It much faster which is what I need.