[NTLUG:Discuss] bash question

[herrold]

On Wed, 12 Sep 2001, Wrenn, Bobby J. wrote:

> If I can get an answer to this I will finally be able to use Linux at work.

... hmmm a worthy cause

> I need to take 209 pdf files with spaces in the file names. and convert them
> into text. I am very new to scripting and know nothing about regular
> expressions. Is there an easy way to remove the spaces from the file names?

Testing a thought:

[herrold at pokey herrold]$ ls | tr ' ' '#' | grep \#
IP#and#PC#Names#for#Owl#River.rtf
[herrold at pokey herrold]$ ls I*
IHN.doc                            Image012.jpg
Interim_CEO_092799_v1.doc          IP and PC Names for Owl River.rtf

... OK -- I have a method ...

> Then how do I recursively submit the files to pdftotext with the same name
> except for the .pdf changed to .txt?

for i in ` ls *.pdf | tr ' ' '_'`; do
	DONAME=`basename $i .pdf`
	pdftotext $DONAME.pdf $DONAME.txt
done

... untested, but it should work ... test on a copy ... backup
first, etc ...

> Just getting that much done will be a big help.

-- Russ Herrold