Question

The following works fine on Mac OS X:

#!/bin/bash
R CMD Sweave myfile.Rnw
pdflatex myfile.tex
open myfile.pdf

Now, I realize that these 3 lines of code are really helpful for my work – independently of some particular file. Thus I’d like to use the file as an argument. I know how to use an argument itself but have problems splitting the input after the string and concat it afterwards. If I was able to split the filename argument like:

split($1,".") # return some array or list ("name","ext")

Or is there a simpler, completely different way than using Python within a shell script?

Thx in advance for any general advice and examples as well !

Answer 1

You could just take the base name as an argument and use $1.Rnw, $1.tex, and $1.pdf. Python is great for shell scripts, but I usually stick with bash for things less than 10 lines long.

If you really want to take a file name, you can use cut -f 1 -d '.' $1.