Question

I am trying to make a script to append all files ending with .hash to be verified by md5deep. Files with space in their name seem to break this script.

#!/bin/bash
XVAR=""
for f in *.hash
do
    XVAR="$XVAR -x $f "
done
md5deep -e $XVAR -r *

Whenever i run the script with a file called “O S.hash” i would get

O: No such file or directory

If i change XVAR="$XVAR -x $f " to XVAR="$XVAR -x \'$f\' " or XVAR="$XVAR -x \"$f\" "

md5deep will interpenetrate the input as “O instead

"O: No such file or directory

an echo of the variable in the script shows XVAR as -x 'O S.hash' or -x "O S.hash"

a manual input of the command in shell such as md5deep -e -x "O S.hash" -r * works but if its in the script the command seems to break

Answer 1

This is not the nicest solution, but is seems it will work:

find . -name '*.hash' -printf "-x\0%p\0" | xargs -0 md5deep -r * -e

This actually doesn’t do exactly the same as the OP wanted, so here’s a modification as suggested by Tim Pote and Jonathan Leffler:

find . -maxdepth 1 -name '*.hash' -printf "-x\0%p\0" | xargs -0 md5deep -r * -e