Question

I’m trying to go the current directory and all sub direcotires, and add some annotations into each file that ends in .sql

heres a snippet of the code

HEADER="--SQL HEADER"

for f in 'find . -name *.sql';
do
        echo $f
        echo -e $HEADER > $f.tmp;
        FNAME=${f//\//_/};
        echo -e "\n\n--MORE ANNOTATIONS ${FNAME%.*}:1" >> $f.tmp;
        cat $f >> $f.tmp;
        mv $f.tmp $f;
        rm $f.tmp
done;

im a beginner at bash so i think some of the errors im getting might be due to the find statement with the loop
but this is the error i get

find . -name X.sql A.sql W.sql E.sql S.sql
./annotate.sh: line 6: $f.tmp: ambiguous redirect
./annotate.sh: line 8: $f.tmp: ambiguous redirect
./annotate.sh: line 9: $f.tmp: ambiguous redirect
mv: invalid option -- n
Try `mv --help' for more information.
rm: invalid option -- n
Try `rm --help' for more information.

any help would be greatly appreciated =)

Answer 1

Here’s the problem. Your “echo” gives it away:

echo $f

outputs

find . -name X.sql A.sql W.sql E.sql S.sql

I think the problem is you have straight single quotes (”) in the find command, instead of backquotes (“). So it’s not really running find, but simply expanding the wildcards.

You may have to quote the wildcard so it gets passed to find instead of evaluated by the shell:

for f in `find . -name \*.sql`;

However, there are several problems in your script, which you should address if you want to use it more than once. See ormaaj’s answer.