Loop through files in a directory

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hi,
I want to write bash script that will keep on looking for files in a directory and if any file exists, it processes them. I want it to be a background process, which keeps looking for files in a directory.
Is there any way to do that in bash script?
I can loop through all the files like this:
for i in `ls -1 \dirname\*`
do
....
done
I can make it an endless loop llike this while [ true ]
do
done
Thanks for all you help.
R

2

Why not run the process in the background ?

rladda.sh

#! /bin/sh

while true
do
for file in `ls /path/to/dir`
do
[[ -f $file ]] && echo "$file exists"
done
sleep 60
done

Check the /path/to/dir for any file every 60 seconds.

Run the script as

/path/to/rladda.sh &

Vino

1 Like
3

You can run the script in cron also to check for the file and process the same if it exists. Just a suggestion. :slight_smile:

4

True. cron can be used. And I think it would be a better suggestion than the sleep.

The & makes the script remain alive throughout. If done as a cron job, then once the job is done, the script exits until it is called again.

My 2 cents,
Vino

5

works well. thank you

Alice