How to pass * as part of argument string to script?

[Joel Rees]

Pardon the top post, but it seems appropriate for this one.

Note that there are several types of quote characters that can be used, and
each has a different effect.

man bash

And then experiment with different kinds of quoting. Experiment with
escaping, as well. (My experience is that experiment works better than
trying to understand explanations without experiment.)

2021年8月25日(水) 16:27 Bo Berglund <bo.berglund at gmail.com>:

> I am writing a script to prune a directory of certain files and it works
> fine
> provided the pattern to search for is entered directly in the script.
> But when I try to set it as a parameter on the command line the pattern
> seems to
> be expanded before being read by the script...
> How can I avoid this?
>
> Here is how I read the template argument:
>
> if [ -z "$2" ]; then
>   template="202*.mp4" #Default file template for listing
> else
>   template="$2"
> fi
>
> And here is how template is used:
> cntall=`find . -maxdepth 1 -name "202*.mp4" -printf '.' | wc -m`
> #cntall=`find . -maxdepth 1 -name "${template}" -printf '.' | wc -m`
>
> As shown it works OK using the first line.
>
> But if I move the comment to the line above and enter the string 202*.mp4
> as
> argument 2 on the command line then the script is no longer working.
>
> It turns out that $template is set to the first file name *matching* the
> pattern
> with the entered wildcard *!
>
> So if I have these files:
> 2021-08-12_myvideo.mp4
> 2021-08-13_myvideo.mp4
> 2021-08-14_myvideo.mp4
> 2021-08-15_myvideo.mp4
> 2021-08-16_myvideo.mp4
> 2021-08-17_myvideo.mp4
>
> I expect cntall to be set to 6 but in fact it will be 1 because inside the
> script the entered string 202*.mp4 intended as $template is expanded to be
> 2021-08-12_myvideo.mp4, which when used as $template always will return 1
> from
> the call above...
>
> How can I use a template input with the script without Ubuntu expanding my
> input
> before it gets to the script?
>
>
> --
> Bo Berglund
> Developer in Sweden
>
>
> --
> ubuntu-users mailing list
> ubuntu-users at lists.ubuntu.com
> Modify settings or unsubscribe at:
> https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-users
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-users/attachments/20210825/590b7c13/attachment.html>