Question

I’ve written a bash script to run a series of commands, culminating in a file called DataAudit.txt. It works great… if the file I am working with happens to be called file.csv.

I’m very new to all of this and not sure how to write the script so it can work on whichever file I want to audit.

The script, called audit.sh, lives in a folder called PurgatoryCSV and the idea is that I would drop a file in there, run the script, and move the file to the next step in my workflow.

I would be grateful for any help I could get with this roadblock.

Here is the script:

#!/bin/bash

echo -n "DATA AUDIT

------------
COLUMN NAMES
------------

" > DataAudit.txt
csvcut -n file.csv >> DataAudit.txt
echo -n "

---------------------------------------
FIRST TEN ROWS OF FIRST FIVE COLUMNS 
---------------------------------------

" >> DataAudit.txt
csvcut -c 1,2,3,4,5 file.csv | head -n 10 >> DataAudit.txt
echo -n "

------------
COLUMN STATS
------------

" >> DataAudit.txt
csvcut file.csv | csvstat >> DataAudit.txt
echo -n "

---END AUDIT" >> DataAudit.txt

Answer 1

You can use variables that are passed in from the command line: $1 for the first, $2 for the second, etc. It looks like you have two variables here, the file.csv and DataAudit.txt

If you replace file.csv with $1 and DataAudit.txt with $2, you can now execute your script by doing:

./audit.sh myotherfile.csv MyOtherAudit.txt

---

Alternatively for more readability, it is common to assign these into named variables at the top of your script:

INPUTFILE=$1
OUTPUTFILE=$2

Then, in your code you can reference these with $INPUTFILE and $OUTPUTFILE