Training scripts

[Fred Yankowski]

On Tue, Jan 27, 2004 at 05:33:06PM -0500, Matej Cepl wrote:
>    find $MAILDIR/_junk/ -type f -name 10\* \
>        -exec sh -c "export STR=`basename '{}'`" \; \
>        -exec echo $STR \; 
> 
> The script prints only 143 empty lines. What am I doing 
> incorrectly?

That exported STR value survives only as long as the 'sh' program run
in the first '-exec' parameter.  It's gone when the second '-exec'
process runs.

I think the following would do what you intended the above to do:

    find $MAILDIR/_junk/ -type f -name 10\* -print | sed 's#.*/##'

where that sed script is effectively running 'basename' over a stream.

My feeling is that you are trying to do too much inside 'find' itself.
I prefer to feed the output of 'find' into 'xargs' or into a shell
'while' loop:

	find $MAILDIR -type f -print |
	while read MAILFILE; do
	    STR=$(basename $MAILFILE)
	    echo $STR
	    ... whatever else ...
	done