Question

I have a folder with multiple sub-folders and each sub-folder contains 10-15 files. I want to perform a certain operation only on the text files in these folders. The folders contain other types of files as well. For now, I am just trying to write a simple for loop to access every file.

for /r in *.txt; do "need to perform this on every file"; done


This gives me an error -bash: ``/R': not a valid identifier

Thanks for the help.

P.S I am using cygwin on Win 7.

Answer 1

Your /r is the problem, that’s not a valid identifier (as bash said, you need to drop the /). Also, this won’t recurse into subdirectories. If your operation is simple, you can directly use the exec option of find. {} is a placeholder for the filename.

find . -name "*.txt" -exec ls -l {} \;

Otherwise, try something like

for r in $( find . -name "*.txt" ) ; do
    echo $r
    #more actions...
done