Question

I am using a loop to read the contents of an array, which contains all of the directories and files in the directory hierarchy called ‘music’ (contents are strings from the previous output of ‘find’ command). The idea is to separate the full directory path of each array element in “directory_contents” into substrings according to genre, artist, and title. Since my music directory is sorted first by genre, then by artist, then by title, I am grabbing each relevant item using awk where the delimiter “/” shows up. For example, if the directory looks like this after using find “./Electronic/Squarepusher/My Red Hot Car.aif”, I will separate “Electronic”, “Squarepusher”, and “My Red Hot Car”, then store them each in separate arrays for genre, artist, and title. Later I will sort these data, then pipe the sorted output into another utility to print all the directory contents in a nice looking table (haven’t done this yet). For now, I am just trying to view the results of the string separation with echo statements, and for the most part it seems to work. However, I can’t seem to extract substrings which contain spaces, which isn’t good:

-->./Hip-Hop/OutKast/title1.aif<--
Genre:
Hip-Hop
Artist:
OutKast
Title:
title1

-->./Hip-Hop/OutKast/title2.aif<--
Genre:
Hip-Hop
Artist:
OutKast
Title:
title2

-->./Hip-Hop/OutKast/title3.aif<--
Genre:
Hip-Hop
Artist:
OutKast
Title:
title3

-->./Jazz/John<--
Genre:
Jazz
Artist:
John
Title:


-->Coltrane/title1.aif<--
Genre:
title1.aif
Artist:

Title:

As you can see, when the loop reads in the string “John Coltrane”, it is treating the space as a delimiter, and treating everything after “John” as a different filename. I tried looking for a solution in the bash manual under the section “Arrays” as well as other posts here, but couldn’t find a solution that worked for my specific problem (sorry). If anyone has ideas, they would be greatly appreciated. The problematic code appears below, in the for loop (I didn’t post the whole script because it is pretty lengthy, but let me if it is needed):

#more before this...

#declare variables                                                                                                      
declare -a genre_list                                                                                                   
declare -a title_list                                                                                                   
declare -a artist_list                                                                                                  
declare -a directory_contents                                                                                           


#populate directory with contents                                                                                       
cd $directory                                                                                                           
directory_contents=$(find .  -mindepth 1 -type f)                                                                       
cd ..                                                                                                                   


for music_file in ${directory_contents[*]}; do                                                                          
    if [[ $DEBUG = "true" ]] ; then                                                                                     
        echo "-->$music_file<--"                                                                                        
    fi                                                                                                                  

    echo "Genre:"                                                                                                       
    echo $music_file | awk -F"/" '{print $2}'                                                              
    echo "Artist:"                                                                                                      
    echo $music_file | awk -F"/" '{print $3}'                                                               
    echo "Title:"                                                                                                       
    echo $music_file | awk -F"/" '{print $4}' | awk -F"." '{print $1}'                                     
    echo ""                                                                                                             
done   

Answer 1

Why don’t you simply do it in single line:

cd $directory && \
find .  -mindepth 3 -maxdepth 3 -type f | \ 
awk -F'/' '{split($4,A,".aif"); printf "Genre: %s\nArtist: %s\nTitle: %s\n\n",$2,$3,A[1];}'

Update: (removed the .aif from the Title part)