Bash – Why doesn’t this loop process one file at a time

bashshell-scriptwildcards

I've got a directory with various files:

main.js
SomeClass.js
View.jsx

And I want to loop through all the .jsx files. So I wrote this Bash script:

for JSX_FILE in "$BUILD_DIR/*.jsx"; do   
    echo $JSX_FILE
    echo "PATH: $JSX_FILE"
    JSX_FILENAME=$(basename "$JSX_FILE")
    echo "NAME: $JSX_FILENAME"
done

But for some reason that would print this:

/path/to/View.jsx

PATH: /path/to/*.jsx

NAME: *.jsx

So I don't understand why in one case $JSX_FILE has the value /path/to/View.jsx and in another case it has the value /path/to/*.jsx. How can I make sure this variable will have the same value everywhere within the loop?

Best Answer

Quoting the glob inhibits globbing.

for JSX_FILE in "$BUILD_DIR"/*.jsx; do

Related Solutions

Bash – Referencing bash array variables from another array

Bash 4.3 and later supports "name references", or namerefs (a similar concept exists in ksh93, but the scoping is annoyingly different):

#!/bin/bash

array1=('array1string1' 'array1string2')
array2=('array2string1' 'array2string2')

array_names=('array1' 'array2')

for a in "${array_names[@]}"; do
    declare -n arr="$a"

    for b in "${arr[@]}"; do
        echo "$b"
    done
done

The variable arr is a nameref that acts like an alias for the named variable (the variable with name $a in this example).

Without namerefs, in earlier Bash versions, one solution would be to create a new array that contains all the elements from the other arrays:

all=( "${array1[@]}" "${array2[@]}" )

... a bit like the array_names array in the question but with the contents of all arrays, and then iterate over "${all[@]}".

It's also possible to use eval, but the resulting code looks astoundingly awful.

See glenn jackman's answer for a variation with variable indirection (introduced in its current form with Bash version 2).

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Bash – Referencing bash array variables from another array

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