Question

(Linux newbie here)

I have a directory containing a master file ‘cs010101.SETUP’ and a number of sub-directories. Each sub-directory contains a large number of files including some of the format cs??????.dat3. I’m looking for a way to find all the cs??????.dat3 files and then for each, in its corresponding directory, create a soft link back to the master file (cs010101.SETUP) with the six digit number changed to the match the respective cs??????.dat3 file.

e.g If a sub-directory contains the file cs219254.dat3, I want to perform the command

ln -s ../cs010101.SETUP cs219254.SETUP

So far I’ve got as far as the find command

find . -name "cs*dat3"

and looked at piping to cut in order to extract the number

find . -name "cs*dat3" | cut -c 13-18

(this works currently as the naming convention for the sub-directories is consistent, though would be nice if didn’t have to rely on that fact).

But now I’m stumped!

Answer 1

Use sed. Script may look like this:

for dname in `find . -maxdepth 1 -name "*" -type d`; do #list all subdirectories of this directory only
    for fnum in `find $dname -name "cs*.dat3" | sed 's/^.*cs\([0-9]*\)\.dat3$/\1/'`; do #extract numbers of needed files in subdir
        ln -s $PWD/cs010101.SETUP $dname/cs$fnum.SETUP #create link
    done
done