Question

I don’t expected that this will be a problem. Because I thought the coreutils support these things and then, that a dirty combination of cp ls and rm would be enough.

However, this was not the case and I would be really much appreciated if you now explain me why my approuch is failing and further, how I should do this in a proper way.

Code

function CheckoutFolder {
    local dir=$1


    mkdir "$dir/.CheckoutFolderTmp"
    (
        cd "$dir" \
        && cp -R $(ls -Q -A "$dir" --ignore=".CheckoutFolderTmp") "$dir/.CheckoutFolderTmp" \
        && rm -Rf  $(ls -Q -A "$dir" --ignore=".CheckoutFolderTmp")
    )
    mv "$dir/.CheckoutFolderTmp" "$dir/src"
    mkdir -p "$dir/"{build,log}
}

Sample output

++ CheckoutFolder /home/tobias/Develop/src/thelegacy/RCMeta
++ local dir=/home/tobias/Develop/src/thelegacy/RCMeta
++ mkdir /home/tobias/Develop/src/thelegacy/RCMeta/.CheckoutFolderTmp
++ cd /home/tobias/Develop/src/thelegacy/RCMeta
+++ ls -Q -A /home/tobias/Develop/src/thelegacy/RCMeta --ignore=.CheckoutFolderTmp
++ cp -R '"build"' '"buildmythli.sh"' '"CMakeLists.txt"' '".directory"' '".libbuildmythli.sh"' '"log"' '"RCMeta"' '"RCMetaTest"' '"src"' /home/tobias/Develop/src/thelegacy/RC
cp: cannot stat `"build"': No such file or directory
cp: cannot stat `"buildmythli.sh"': No such file or directory
cp: cannot stat `"CMakeLists.txt"': No such file or directory
cp: cannot stat `".directory"': No such file or directory
cp: cannot stat `".libbuildmythli.sh"': No such file or directory
cp: cannot stat `"log"': No such file or directory
cp: cannot stat `"RCMeta"': No such file or directory
cp: cannot stat `"RCMetaTest"': No such file or directory
cp: cannot stat `"src"': No such file or directory
++ mv /home/tobias/Develop/src/thelegacy/RCMeta/.CheckoutFolderTmp /home/tobias/Develop/src/thelegacy/RCMeta/src
++ mkdir -p /home/tobias/Develop/src/thelegacy/RCMeta/build /home/tobias/Develop/src/thelegacy/RCMeta/log
++ return 0

Mythli

Answer 1

As Les says, ls -Q is putting quotation-marks around the filenames, and those quotation-marks are getting passed in the arguments to cp and rm. (The use of quotation-marks to quote and delimit arguments is an aspect of the Bash command-line, when you actually type in a command; it doesn’t work when you’re passing the output of one command into another.) In general, parsing the output of ls is not generally a good idea.

Here is an alternative approach:

function CheckoutFolder() (
    cd "$1"

    mkdir .CheckoutFolderTmp

    find -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -not -name .CheckoutFolderTmp \
         -exec mv {} .CheckoutFolderTmp/{} \;

    mv .CheckoutFolderTmp src

    mkdir build log
)

(Note that I surrounded the function body with parentheses (...) rather than curly-brackets {...}. This causes the whole function to be run in a subshell.)