Question

I am new to shell scripting. so kindly bear with me if my doubt is too silly.

I have png images in 2 different directories and an executable which takes an images from each directory and processes them to generate a new image.

I am looking for a for loop construct which can take two variables simultaneously..this is possible in C, C++ etc but how do I accomplish something of the following. The code is obviously wrong.

#!/bin/sh

im1_dir=~/prev1/*.png  
im2_dir=~/prev3/*.png
index=0

for i,j in $im1_dir $im2_dir  # i iterates in im1_dir and j iterates in im2_dir 
do
  run_black.sh $i $j  
done

thanks!

Answer 1

If you are depending on the two directories to match up based on a locale sorted order (like your attempt), then an array should work.

im1_files=(~/prev1/*.png)
im2_files=(~/prev3/*.png)

for ((i=0;i<=${#im1_files[@]};i++)); do
   run_black.sh "${im1_files[i]}" "${im2_files[i]}"
done