Syntax error in a bash script that calls find

Question

Where is the error in this script please:

#!/bin/bash rep="git" files=`find' ${rep} '-type f` for f in ${files} do echo $f done 

When i run find git -type f alone in the shell, it works!

Answer 1

Strings in single quotes are not interpolated. It means, you are trying to run

find ' ${rep} '-type f 

Remove the single quotes. If you really need to quote the $rep (e.g. because it contains spaces), use double quotes:

files=`find "$rep" -type f` 

Note that there are no spaces inside the double quotes. You are searching 'git', not ' git ', right?

Answer 2

Don't store the output of find in a variable. It's unreliable and inefficient. Inefficient, because find has to finish running before you start processing its output; this makes a difference on a large directory tree. Unreliable because even if you got the command syntax right, the output of find would consists of a list of file names separated by newlines. This is ambiguous unless the file names are known not to contain newlines. Furthermore, you aren't parsing the output correctly: with an unquoted command substitution $(…), the result of the command is broken into separate words wherever there's whitespace (not just newlines), and the words are interpreted as shell glob patterns. To avoid this processing, use "$(…)" (always put double quotes around variable and command substitutions: "$foo", "$(foo)"); this is no good here since you need to separate the file names.

find has a built-in feature to process the resulting files: the -exec action. Use it. That's what it's for.

find "$rep" -type f -exec echo {} \; 

If you need to run an arbitrary shell snippet and not just a single command on each file, invoke a shell as the command. To avoid mangling the file name, pass it as a parameter to the shell.

find "$rep" -type f -exec sh -c ' echo "$0" # more shell commands ... ' {} \; 

Answer 3

Remove quotes from

 files=`find '$rep' -type f` 

The correct script is

 #!/bin/bash rep="git" files=`find $rep -type f` for f in ${files}; do echo $f done 

Answer 4

Add space after ' and before -type