Bash – Remove everything except csv file Bash Script

bashlinuxrmwildcards

I would like to delete everything from a folder except csv files

I am trying with a bash script and I am getting this error:

syntax error near unexpected token `('

This is my script :

 PATH=/tmp/

 run_spark_local
 rm -v !($PATH*.csv)

 cp -r $PATH /data/logs/

I have also tried

rm -v !("$PATH*.csv")

Best Answer

You should avoid setting the PATH variable. This is used by your shell to find valid commands, setting it to /tmp/ is going to prevent the script from being able to find the rm and cp commands altogether.

You can accomplish what you want with the following find command:

find /tmp -not -name '*.csv' -not -path /tmp -exec rm -vr {} \;

Note: this will delete any subdirectories under /tmp as well. If you do not want this you must change to:

find /tmp -not -name '*.csv' -type f -exec rm -v {} \;

Another note: This will still recurse into the subdirectories and delete the files in them. If you do not want this you can use the maxdepth argument:

find /tmp -not -name '*.csv' -maxdepth 1 -type f -exec rm -v {} \;

Extra note: I would never run a find ... -exec command that you find online without verifying it will do what you need it to do first. You should run:

find /tmp -not -name '*.csv' -not -path /tmp

And verify it is finding only the files you want before adding the -exec rm -vr {} \; bit.

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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