Shell – How to pass a command-line program a list of files from a directory

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I am trying to upload documents to my Microsoft OneDrive account using python-onedrive. The command I am using is this:

onedrive-cli put Long\ Filename\ 1.jpg
onedrive-cli put Long\ Filename\ 2.jpg

The problem is that there are a lot of these files, and I want to upload all of them (There is no option to upload an entire directory). I have using the asterisk but that doesn't work either:

user@office-debian:~/Desktop/docs$ onedrive-cli put *
usage: onedrive-cli [-h] [-c path] [-p] [-i] [-e enc] [--debug]

                    {auth,quota,recent,info,info_set,link,ls,mkdir,get,put,cp,mv,rm,comments,comment_add,comment_delete,tree}
                    ...
onedrive-cli: error: unrecognized arguments: Long Filename 1.jpg Long Filename 2.jpg

I presume this is because the program expects the spaces to be escaped, but the asterisk doesn't expand them that way. I have tried "piping" the arguments to no avail:

user@office-debian:~/Desktop/docs$ ls | onedrive-cli put
usage: onedrive-cli put [-h] [-n] file [folder]
onedrive-cli put: error: too few arguments

Evidently onedrive-cli doesn't recognise STDIN. Are there any other simple options left? I realise I could probably write a script but I was really hoping to avoid that!

The following seems to work, but it's not really what I had in mind:

for files in * ; do
  onedrive-cli put "$files"
done

Best Answer

If the following doesn't work...

cd ./target_dir
    set -- *
    onedrive-cli put "$@"

Then it's probably because you need a put for every argument in which case this might:

{    printf 'one-drive-cli' 
     printf " put ///%s///" *
} | sed 's|'\''|&"&"&|g;s|///|'\''|g' |
. /dev/stdin

But if that doesn't work then your for loop probably is the best shell solution because your python script will only support one upload per invocation.

The best way to do it though is to edit the python script to meet your needs.

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