shell script question

[Erik Price]

bscott at ntisys.com wrote:

> 
>   First, a pet peeve of mine: Use
> 
> 	for i in * ;
> 
> instead of
> 
> 	for i in `ls` ;

I always forget that it can be done that way, but in fact, in this case 
I was ls'ing a diff't directory.  I just posted a simplified version to 
the list.  Also, I recall from an earlier discussion on this list that 
"find" is generally better to use in situations like this than "ls" but 
"ls" takes less arguments, and I just wanted to quickly get an estimate 
of a directory's disk usage, not write a true full-blown shell script. 
I'll try to remember that I can glob instead.

>   A corrected version of your original might be:
> 
> 	for i in * ; do du -khs "$i" ; done
> 
>   The loop variable is placed in double-quotes to make sure the "du" command
> sees it as a single word.  Otherwise, if one of your directories contained
> spaces or other shell meta-characters, it would get mangled by the shell
> before it got passed to "du".  The rest of the command ("du" and "-khs")  
> you want parsed as individual words so they get handled by the shell as the
> command to run and said command's arguments, respectively.

Good point.

>   Hope this helps,

Yes it does.  Thank you.


Erik