Re: Issues with read and loop in bash

[Igor Pechtchanski <pechtcha at cs dot nyu dot edu>]

On Mon, 25 Oct 2004, Axel Dreher wrote:

> Hello @all,
>
> I`m new to this group, so please apologize if my posting does not
> conform to formal restrictions. ;-)
>
> In addition, my english is quite poor, so please apologize this too. ;-)
>
> Well, I have following problem. I searched this already in the
> gmane-database for this newsgroup, but didn`t find an appropriate
> answer. (possible bad searchwords?)
>
> I wrote a shell script using bash at Suse 9.1.
> This shell script includes following section:
> ----------------snip-------------------------------
> while read lines
>
>    do
>        check=FALSE
>        while read lines_2
>
>            do
> 	        if ([ $lines = $lines_2 ]) then    # this is line 63
>
> 		check=TRUE
> 		break
>
> 		fi
>
>            done < $3/only_hashes_right.log
>
>      if ([ $check = FALSE ]) then
>
>         echo $lines >> $3/singles_only_hashes.log
>
>      fi
>
>    done < $3/only_hashes_left.log
> -----------------------snip------------------------------------
>
> The logfiles just have hashes (of pdf-files) inside, created by md5sum.
> Each of the 2 logfiles have some thousand of these hashes, one per line.
> In the outer loop each hash is read from the first logfile and will be
> compared with each hash in the second logfile using the inner loop. If a
> "Partner" is found, the inner loop breaks. If no Partner is found, this
> hash is printed in a third logfile called singles_only_hashes.log, as
> you can see above. I`m not sure if the check-variable is necessary,
> though. With Suse this section and the whole script works properly, but
> not with bash under cygwin with Windows XP. It creates following error
> message:
>
> line 63: [: too many arguments
>
> and this a thousand of times. I marked the corresponding line in the
> script above. I also used as "shebang" this: #!/bin/bash instead of
> #!/bin/sh, but this didn`t solve the problem.
>
> Could anybody point me to the right direction?

Just for the record (yes, I know you've fixed the problem), line 63 above
contains unquoted strings, which will cause problems if the file has
spaces.  For that matter, so does most of the rest of the chunk above.
You should almost always quote the variable references.
HTH,
	Igor
-- 
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