4 ms·

It's not necessary to bring Python into it, Bash can handle filenames with weird characters properly if you know how to use it. E.g. instead of `ls | grep -Ev

It's not necessary to bring Python into it, Bash can handle filenames with weird characters properly if you know how to use it. E.g. instead of `ls | grep -Ev 'wav|draft'`, you'd have to do something like for filename in *; do if grep -E 'wav|draft' >/dev/null <<< "$filename" then : # ... fi done Of course, it's more convoluted, but when you're writing scripts that might be used for a long time and by many people, it helps to know that it is possible to write robust things. Tools like shellcheck certainly help.

PeterWhittaker 2y ago
grep -q and you won’t need the redirect of stdout.
ykonstant 2y ago
The above is perfectly fine for small directories, but in general the preferred way to loop over files is with find: find . ! -name . -prune \ -exec grep -qE 'wav|draft' {} \; \ -exec "${action}" \; ; Edit: I missed the herestring in the original code, so the above is wrong as mentioned in the comments; if your find has regex, you can use it to save one grep: find . ! -name . -prune \ -regex '.*wav.*\|.*draft.*' \ -exec "${action}" \; ; Otherwise you can call sh to printf the filename into a grep. However, the point of my post is that find can perform seek, filter and execute, and should be used for all three unless it is really impossible (which is unlikely).
- tux1968 2y ago
  Your example is grepping the file contents, where GP is using grep to select the filenames.
  - ykonstant 2y ago
    D'oh!
some_random 2y ago
At that point I think you need to ask yourself why you're using Bash to begin with. If it's just meant to be a quick script that's run occasionally then this is good but probably overkill. If it's going into prod to be run regularly as part of business critical, then it should be in a language that has a less convoluted way to _ls a directory_. There's an inflection point somewhere in there, where it is depends on you.
- mywittyname 2y ago
  Am I monitoring the execution? Yes: bash is probably fine. No: real programming language time.

PeterWhittaker 2y ago

grep -q and you won’t need the redirect of stdout.

ykonstant 2y ago

The above is perfectly fine for small directories, but in general the preferred way to loop over files is with find: find . ! -name . -prune \ -exec grep -qE 'wav|draft' {} \; \ -exec "${action}" \; ; Edit: I missed the herestring in the original code, so the above is wrong as mentioned in the comments; if your find has regex, you can use it to save one grep: find . ! -name . -prune \ -regex '.*wav.*\|.*draft.*' \ -exec "${action}" \; ; Otherwise you can call sh to printf the filename into a grep. However, the point of my post is that find can perform seek, filter and execute, and should be used for all three unless it is really impossible (which is unlikely).

tux1968 2y ago
Your example is grepping the file contents, where GP is using grep to select the filenames.
- ykonstant 2y ago
  D'oh!

some_random 2y ago

At that point I think you need to ask yourself why you're using Bash to begin with. If it's just meant to be a quick script that's run occasionally then this is good but probably overkill. If it's going into prod to be run regularly as part of business critical, then it should be in a language that has a less convoluted way to _ls a directory_. There's an inflection point somewhere in there, where it is depends on you.

mywittyname 2y ago
Am I monitoring the execution? Yes: bash is probably fine. No: real programming language time.