Bash – Error with a file name containing parentheses

bashquotingshell

when I tried to change file name from old.file(1).gz to new.file.gz, It says syntax error, I am using ubuntu 12.04.

mv old.file(1).gz new.file.gz
bash: syntax error near unexpected token `('

Best Answer

Yeti's comment will work for you, but if you would like to know why, it's because parentheses are interpreted as special characters, and have to either be escaped with \ or the entire filename quoted (as above) [edit: sorry, only the ( and ) need to be quoted].

If you have tab completion enabled, just type the first few characters of the file name and hit tab. I.e., typing mv old and hitting tab, should turn into mv old.file\(1\).gz (unless there are other potential files that old* could refer to).

Related Solutions

Bash – Why Can’t I Call Two Aliases With “;”

An alias is expanded simply by replacing the alias by its definition (as a list of tokens, not a string, which is basically equivalent to taking the string and adding a space at the end). So stopdev; true is expanded to

cd $HOME/website; make website_stop; make backend_stop; ; true
                                                      ^^^

Since you can't have two consecutive semicolons in the shell syntax, that's a syntax error.

You can remove the ;, and that will make stopdev; startev work, but it isn't good, because any argument you pass to stopdev will be passed to make backend_stop, which is probably not desirable.

You should make this a function. Also, don't run the make commands if the cd command fails.

stopdev () {
  cd "$HOME/website" && {
    make website_stop
    make backend_stop
  }
}

An improvement would be to make the function return a failure code even if make website_stop fails but make backend_stop succeeds.

stopdev () {
  cd "$HOME/website" && {
    make website_stop
    ret=$?
    make backend_stop && return $ret
  }
}

Note that this leaves you in the ~/website directory. To avoid changing the directory of the shell process, run the function in a subshell.

stopdev () (
  cd "$HOME/website" && {
    make website_stop
    ret=$?
    make backend_stop && return $ret
  }
)

Alternatively, with GNU make, you can use its -C option.

stopdev () {
  make -C "$HOME/website" website_stop
  ret=$?
  make -C "$HOME/website" backend_stop && return $ret
}

If the targets never fail, just pass them both.

stopdev () (
  cd "$HOME/website" && make website_stop backend_stop
)

stopdev () {
  make -C "$HOME/website" website_stop backend_stop
}

Bash – Syntax error near unexpected token `done’

Either the do should appear on a new line, or it needs to have a semi-colon inserted in front of it
<FIRST-LAST> should actually be the name of a shell variable, and FIRST-LAST should be a reference to that variable. < and > are not legal characters for shell variables, so we can deduce that something else must be substituted here instead. person seems to be as good a variable name as any in this particular case.

I think something like this should work much better:

while read person ; do
        echo "${person}"
        curl -O "https://www.uoguelph.ca/arts/history/people/${person}"
done < formatted_history.txt

This assumes that the file formatted_history.txt actually exists in the current directory and is a list of people from the https://www.uoguelph.ca/arts/history/people/ page - something like:

tara-abraham
donna-andrew
susan-armstrong-reid
... etc ...

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Bash – Why Can’t I Call Two Aliases With “;”

Bash – Syntax error near unexpected token `done’

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