a *very* odd question especially for me. Janina Sajka <janina at rednote.net> wrote

Tony Baechler tony at baechler.net
Fri Jul 31 09:09:16 UTC 2015


I apologize in advance to people outside of the US.

Obviously, Christopher, you've never had to deal with books from NLS BARD in 
bash before.  It's a major problem because of the spaces.  I did eventually 
find a workaround courtesy of cyberciti.biz.  If anyone cares, I'll post my 
script, but it's very specific to my local setup.  No, I don't wish to 
rename them because I want to keep the book number and as much other 
information as possible.  Out of curiosity, how would you handle names like 
this?  I want to make a new directory on my SD card under $vrdtb, cd to that 
directory, unzip the NLS book and repeat.  I generally have at least a few 
dozen books to process at a time.  Again, I now have a working solution. 
Until I did some experimenting and poking around on Google, I had to do this 
manually.  When NLS started adding a lot more books every week from their 
analog conversion, this was no longer practical.  The filenames appear below:

DB -- Analog Science Fiction and Fact (Astounding!) (December 2012).zip
DB Asimov's Science Fiction June_ 2013.zip
DB New York Times Book Review October 27_ 2013.zip
DB-Unspecified-The Holy Bible, Containing the Old and New Testaments- 
Translated out of the Original Tongues and with the Former Translations 
Diligently Compared a-DB68777.zip

To directly answer your question, bash tries to process each word of the 
filename separately, even when you put them in quotes, at least in a for 
loop.  If you manually process one at a time, it works fine.  I don't know 
why it doesn't work in a for loop even with quoting the filename, but it 
doesn't.  You have to tell bash to not treat space as a separator.

On 7/30/2015 5:36 AM, Christopher Chaltain wrote:
> I guess I'd need to see an example of how these characters trip someone up
> in a file name using a BASH script while they are handled differently in the
> DOS batch processor. With few exceptions, I find quoting literals to work
> both in a script file and on the command line.




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