Consider this simple script:
#!/bin/bash
DIR="$1"
for f in "$DIR"; do
if [[ "$f" == "*.txt" ]];
then
echo "Filename is $f"
fi
done
I want to only return files with .txt extension. Calling the script with:
./script1 /home/admin/Documents
Returns nothing. No error, just blank. What is wrong?
I assume that you expect to loop through all files within the directory you pass. To do that, you need to change your loop:
for file in "$1"/*
It's worth mentioning that for doesn't have any built-in behaviour to enumerate items in a directory, it simply iterates over the list of words that you pass it. The *, expanded by the shell, is what results in the loop iterating over a list of files.
Your condition would need modifying too, as the * needs to be outside of quotes (and the rest doesn't need to be inside them, either):
if [[ $f = *.txt ]]
But you can avoid the need for the conditional by directly looping through all files ending in .txt:
for file in "$1"/*.txt
You may also want to consider the case where there are no matches, in which case I guess you expect the loop not to run. One way to do that in bash would be:
# failing glob expands to nothing, rather than itself
shopt -s nullglob
for file in "$1"/*.txt
# ...
done
# unset this behaviour if you don't want it in the rest of the script
shopt -u nullglob
