shell script question

[Steven W. Orr]

On Mon, 20 Jan 2003, Erik Price wrote:

=>Hi,
=>
=>I am probably overlooking something obvious but it seems that when I try 
=>to execute a command-line "for" loop, the "do command" part is not 
=>executed from the current directory.  Is that normal?  Here is what I mean:
=>
=>[erikprice at host:/home/erikprice]$ for i in `ls`; do "`which du` -khs 
=>$i"; done
=>bash: /bin/du -khs bak: No such file or directory
=>bash: /bin/du -khs bin: No such file or directory
=>bash: /bin/du -khs cvs: No such file or directory
=>bash: /bin/du -khs dev: No such file or directory
=>bash: /bin/du -khs docs: No such file or directory
=>bash: /bin/du -khs down: No such file or directory
=>bash: /bin/du -khs ip-up: No such file or directory
=>bash: /bin/du -khs java: No such file or directory
=>bash: /bin/du -khs mail: No such file or directory
=>bash: /bin/du -khs pub: No such file or directory
=>bash: /bin/du -khs public_html: No such file or directory
=>bash: /bin/du -khs tmp: No such file or directory
=>
=>As you can see in the above, I've had to put `which du` in the "do" 
=>section (because for some reason the "du" command isn't found if I don't 
=>specify an absolute path), and the filename arguments passed to the "do" 
=>section aren't found.  If I just type "du -khs bak" then it works fine.
=>
=>My shell is bash 2.05 and I set my $PATH in ~/.bashrc (Gentoo Linux).
=>
=>Thanks,
=>
=>Erik
The quoting is wrong. Do this instead:
for i in `ls`; do `which du` -khs $i; done
The way you had the double quotes caused the shell to think that the 
command to be executed would be the output of which concatenated with -khs 
followed by the filename.

So it was trying to find a single file to execute called

/bin/du -khs bak

But for the life of me I can't figure out why you are running which in the 
first place.

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