Question

APPLICATION_LOG_DIR=/home/users/sosst51/test-chinboon/logs/testdata1
PREFIX=mylog

for i in `ls ${APPLICATION_LOG_DIR}/${PREFIX}*`

Is this a for loop whereby i am passing the ls of the directory into i.

Answer 1

In bash, for s in string will take a string and split it on whitespace, and iterate over each of the words. So:

for s in a b c; do echo $s; done

would print:

a
b
c

By passing it the output of ls, you’re iterating over all of the files in that directory (careful though, it’s going to break if any of the filenames contain spaces). This one in particular is iterating over files that start with “mylog”.