[NTLUG:Discuss] Interesting bash shell scripting

[richard witt]

On Thu, Mar 12, 2009 at 4:23 AM, Stuart Yarus <syarus at kvsystems.org> wrote:
> Daniel Hauck wrote:
>
>>Just thought I'd take a moment to share something I learned.
>>
>>I have this folder with a set of RAR archive files and I wanted to
>>extract them but they are large and it consumes time to use a GUI.  So I
>>decided I wanted to use the command line in some way that makes sense.
>>Unfortunately, I can't just say "unrar x *.rar" because unrar doesn't
>>like this.
>>
>>So I thought "use a for loop!"  And I tried this:
>>
>>for i in `ls -1` ; do unrar x "$i" ; done
>>
>>But that didn't quite yield what I was after as it did weird things in
>>the presence of filenames with spaces in them... and yes, these files
>>have spaces in the names.  So what next?
>>
>>bash's "read" should be able to read a line into a variable and handle
>>spaces just fine!  So I did this:
>>
>>ls -1 | for i in read ; do unrar x "$i" ; done
>>
>>This also had problems.
>>
>>Finally I did a little googling and found this:
>>
>>ls | while read f ; do unrar x "$f" ; done
>>
>>The while loop worked better than the for loop.  I am unsure why that is
>>the case exactly but I am sure Chris will be able to offer a better
>>analysis of the problem and the solutions.  But this technique is rather
>>useful so I thought I would share.
>>
>>_______________________________________________
>>http://www.ntlug.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
>>
>>
>>
>>
> Perhaps the -l option in the first two attempts is a problem.  The data
> other than the filename might confuse unrar.
>
> Stuart Yarus

I do believe that is ls -1 as in the number one.