Question

I am trying to run indent -kr -i8 on all files in my current directory. Being a C programmer, the idea that came to my mind was to fork processes equal to the number of fles, the run exec on them. But I know things can be simplified with shell scripts. Any kind of help is appreciated.

Answer 1

Can you not just:

indent -kr -i8 *.c

You mention forking processes, so if you wanted to do it concurrently:

for f in *.c
do
   indent -kr -i8 $f &
done

But that will trash the cpu if you’ve got a load of files. So in batches:

limit=10
for f in *.c
do
   indent -kr -i8 $f &
   (( count = count + 1 ))

   if [[ $count -eq $limit ]] then
      wait
      count=0
   fi
done