Question

I need to run some commands in OS X User directories, apart from “Shared” and our local admin account.
So far, I have:

#!/bin/bash
userFolders=$(find /Users/ -type d -depth 1 | sed -e 's/\/\//\//g' | egrep -v "support|Shared")
for PERSON in "$userFolders"; do
    mkdir $PERSON/Desktop/flagFolderForLoop
done

Running the above as root, I get

mkdir: /Users/mactest1: File exists

Where might I be going wrong?

Answer 1

You should remove the quotes around "$userFolders" so that your loop iterates over each person correctly.

The following example illustrates the difference between quoting and not quoting:

With quotes:

for i in "a b c"
do
    echo "Param: $i"
done

prints only one parameter:

Param: a b c

Without quotes:

for i in a b c
do
    echo "Param: $i"
done

prints each parameter:

Param: a
Param: b
Param: c

Also, you can tell find to exclude certain directories, like this:

for PERSON in $(find /Users/ -type d -depth 1 ! -name support ! -name Shared)
do
    mkdir "$PERSON"/Desktop/flagFolderForLoop
done