Bash script problem

[c0rrupt]

I am working on a small Bash script to remove some of the junk files that Windows likes to leave laying around (thumbs.db, desktop.ini) but I'm having a problem with folders that contain spaces.

When I have it echo the results everything looks fine. All the lines are enclosed with quotation marks for any directory with spaces. But when I try to remove the files with rm, it freaks out.

Here is the script.



#!/bin/bash

find ~/Music/ -name '*Thumbs.db*' | while read FILE
do
FILE=\"$FILE\"
#echo $FILE
rm -i $FILE
done


Some of the output from echo.



"/home/david/Music/Albums/A Perfect Circle/Thumbs.db"
"/home/david/Music/Albums/A Thorn For Every Heart/Thumbs.db"
"/home/david/Music/Albums/Afghan Whigs/Thumbs.db"
"/home/david/Music/Albums/Against Me!/Thumbs.db"


An error message from rm



rm: cannot remove `"/home/david/Music/Albums/A': No such file or directory
rm: cannot remove `Perfect': No such file or directory
rm: cannot remove `Circle/Thumbs.db"': No such file or directory
rm: cannot remove `"/home/david/Music/Albums/A': No such file or directory
rm: cannot remove `Thorn': No such file or directory
rm: cannot remove `For': No such file or directory
rm: cannot remove `Every': No such file or directory
rm: cannot remove `Heart/Thumbs.db"': No such file or directory
rm: cannot remove `"/home/david/Music/Albums/Afghan': No such file or directory
rm: cannot remove `Whigs/Thumbs.db"': No such file or directory
rm: cannot remove `"/home/david/Music/Albums/Against': No such file or directory
rm: cannot remove `Me!/Thumbs.db"': No such file or directory


I thought that maybe it was because the space didn't have a \ preceding it, but rm accepted this command.



rm -i "/home/david/Music/Albums/A Perfect Circle/Thumbs.db"


Oh, I almost forgot. When I tried rm -i "/home/david/Music/Albums/Against Me!/Thumbs.db I got this ": event not found". The ! must be causing that one.

What is going on here?

[johnnybravo666]

#!/bin/bash

find ~/Music/ -name '*Thumbs.db*' | while read FILE
do
echo $FILE
rm -i "$FILE"
done
This should work

[ghostdog74]

find ~/Music/ -name '*Thumbs.db*' -print0 | xargs -0 rm

[johnnybravo666]

find ~/Music/ -name '*Thumbs.db*' -print0 | xargs -0 rm


That works better. I'll remember that. Thanks

[c0rrupt]

Thanks! It's working fine now.

[mssever]

The lesson from this: Always enclose any variable reference (beginning with $) in double quotes! xargs works great at avoiding this issue, but you won't always be able to use it. So remember the above rule.

(Of course, as you learn Bash better, you'll learn when it's OK to break the rule. But there are very few situations that require you to break it.