Question

I have a script to identify flash files in memory to be copied or passed to a program such as vlc for playback.

#!/bin/bash
pid=($(ps aux | grep flash | grep -v grep | grep -v bin/flash))
cd "/proc/${pid[1]}/fd"
file=($(echo `ls -l  | grep /tmp/`))
file="${file[8]}"
echo "$file"

This works well but I want it to return each matching file, as it is it only returns the first one.

I would normally do something like a multidimensional array but bash doesn’t have those and even if it did I wouldn’t know the syntax.

How do I split the output by line and then echo the [8] value from each?

Answer 1

You could use awk for this:

files=$(ls -l|awk -F"-> " '/\/tmp/{print $2}')

This is not failsafe at all (parsing the output of ls generally isn’t).

A safer approach if your find supports it would be:

files=$(find . -type l -printf "%l\n")

(Still not safe if you have spaces in the filename.)

This should be pretty robust and give you a bash array to boot:

IFS=$'\n' files=($(find . -type l -printf "%l\n"|grep /tmp))

(still fails with filenames that contain \n.)