How do I iterate over files in a directory in Bash?

Question

I'm trying to iterate over a list of files in a directory, encrypt them, and move them somewhere else using bash. Here is what I have so far:

for filename in /home/anthony/documents_preprocessed; do 
    gpg --encrypt --recipient anthony@mydomain.org $filename
    mv /home/anthony/$filename /home/anthony/Documents
done

As I understand it, this should work but I'm fairly new to bash scripting. When I run this, it never encrypts and it just moves the file to the documents directory.

Can anyone tell me what the correct way of doing this is?

Thanks!

`for filename in dest/*`, not `for filename in dest`. `"$filename"`, not `$filename`. And GnuPG doesn't overwrite its input files by default -- which is to say that it doesn't encrypt in-place, and you probably don't want it to; too easy to have data loss in that case. Specify an output file on the gpg command line. — Charles Duffy, Aug 09 '14 at 00:11
Also, "how do I do this in bash?" is a _horrible_ question title, as it doesn't give anyone an idea of what "this" is. Part of the goal of StackOverflow is to build a reusable knowledge base, so other folks can learn from questions and answers; questions titled "How do I do this in bash?" don't usefully contribute to that base. — Charles Duffy, Aug 09 '14 at 00:13
if the real question is how to iterate over directory contents, then this is a dupe: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21954516/iterate-over-files-in-directory-using-bash-script, http://stackoverflow.com/questions/20796200/how-to-iterate-over-files-in-directory-with-bash, http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732861/linux-iterate-over-files-in-directory, etc. — Charles Duffy, Aug 09 '14 at 00:41

score 3 · Answer 1 · answered Aug 09 '14 at 00:27

Use a glob to expand all files in your directory:

for filename in /home/anthony/documents_preprocessed/*; do 
    gpg --encrypt --recipient anthony@mydomain.org "$filename"
    mv "/home/anthony/$filename" /home/anthony/Documents
done

You can and should do shopt -s nullglob first, which will make the loop run 0 instead of 1 times if there are no matching files.

PS: shellcheck automatically points out common problems like this.

How do I iterate over files in a directory in Bash?

1 Answers1