[ale] THANKS to all who replied to "ls -rt | rm -i" problem, BUT...ATTN:JoeKnapka

[Geoffrey]

Bj?rn Gustafsson wrote:
> On 3/19/06, Geoffrey <esoteric at 3times25.net> wrote:
>> Paul Cartwright wrote:
>>> On Sun March 19 2006 7:54 am, Geoffrey wrote:
>>>
>>>> awk is the toy you want:
>>>>
>>>> rm -i $(ls -l | awk '/Mar 15/ {print $NF})
>> Well, I've played around with it a bit, but it's a bit uglier then I
>> expected.  There's no easy way to escape the spaces in a file name with
>> awk in such a way that 'rm -i' will be happy.
> [snip]
>> Problem is, 'rm -i' sees the filename as two different files when passed
>> as in 'rm -i $(...)'
>>
>> I can pipe the output of the script to xargs, but xargs doesn't wait for
>> a response to rm -i, thus that doesn't work either.
> 
> The trick is to use eval. If you change your awk script slightly:
> 
> ls -l |awk '/Mar 15/ {
>     if (NF == 9) { print $NF }
>     else {
>         for (i=9; i<=(NF - 1); i++) {
>             printf "\"%s ", $i; } printf "%s\"\n", $NF; # note quotes
> at start and end of filename
>     }
> }'
> 
> and then run rm like this:
> 
> eval rm -i $(awkScriptNameHere)

I did attempt to escape the spaces but did not use eval.  It does appear 
to work.

> you'll be able to remove those annoying spacey filenames.  At least
> that works with bash; I didn't try it with other bourne-type shells. 
> Note that this will still fail if you somehow get tabs or newlines (or
> other weird $IFS characters you might have) in your filenames, as the
> awk script makes an assumption that only (single) spaces are used as
> field separators.

This is not correct.  The default separator for awk is white space, 
which includes both spaces and tabs.  You can set the field separator 
with the -F flag to awk and you can actually set it to multiple values 
as in:

awk -F '[:|]'

-- 
Until later, Geoffrey