Problem when concatinating wildcard onto file location in bash script

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

I am having difficulty with the following script:

#! /bin/bash

filelist=~/data/${1}*
~/./convertFile $filelist ~/temp/output

Essentially, there are a large number of files in the directory ~/data, each with a four-letter code at the beginning (eg. aaaa001 aaaa002 bbbb001 bbbb002 etc). The argument of this script ($1) is one of these four letter codes.

convertFile is a program written in fortran which takes N arguments, the first N-1 being the location of files that will be converted into one file, which will be outputted to the location in the Nth argument.

When I run (for example):

./convertFile aaaa* output

from the terminal, the "aaaa*" is expanded out and convertFile acts on every file in the expanded list (as one would expect). However, when I try to write a script to do this in an automated process, it doesn't expand out the files, instead passing the explicit directory location ~/data/aaaa* (where, for example, $1 = 'aaaa'). I don't know what's wrong, is there something awry with how I'm concatenating the strings?

2

If you get the directory wrong, it won't expand and will stay a literal *.

You can try 'echo $filelist' to see if it's expanding to what you expected.

3

Thanks, I've double checked it, and the directory is definitely correct.

4

Try specifying an absolute path instead of ~/

And is it exactly as you've given it here, or is anything quoted?

What does the #!/bin/sh line of your script look like?

You could also try feeding it directly into convertfile as in echo convertfile ~/data/${1}* output

5

The directory names have been changed here (to make it read easier) but everything else is exactly the same, including the #! line.

Absolute directory names bring no joy, I'm afraid...

6

Can you post the entire script in one block instead of clips of it?

7

That is the entire script.

8

Above the shell globbing, try

set +o noglob
9

I'm afraid I don't know what the shell globbing is, but I tried it in the script and in the terminal prior to running the script, and I have the same problem.

10

The noglob is a bash-specific shell option that's fairly self-explanatory. I thought maybe it'd gotten turned on somehow.

In the script,

echo ~/data/${1}*

...then copy-paste the resulting output into your shell to see if it expands there. If it doesn't there's a subtle typo.

1 Like
11

Try this
#! /bin/bash
filelist=${1}*
cd ~/data
~/./convertFile $filelist ~/temp/output

12

Okay, I feel stupid. It turns out that it was expanding, but there was actually a file called "aaaa*" in the directory, which meant that the first record in the expansion was "aaaa*", and this in turn made it look like all convertfile was getting was the unexpanded string. Thanks so much for your help!