I have a script that organizes files in my downloads directory according to their filetype.
function moveto {
for filename in *
do
case "${filename##*.}" in
$1 ) echo "!";; # echo statement for debugging
esac
done
}
I have a .png file in my downloads directory and nothing else.
When I call moveto "png", the exclamation mark appears.
When I call moveto "png|jpg", the exclamation mark doesn't appear.
When I simply type png|jpg into the case statement, using no variables, the exclamation mark appears.
I've tried changing things up more than a few ways; using single quotes, double quotes, no quotes, aliases, etc., nothing seems to work. Would be great if someone could help out.
The | in a case statement is part of the syntax of the case statement, so it must be part of the source code. (The same is true of the ) terminating the pattern list.)
You can get the effect you want by enabling extended globs (shopt -s extglob) and then using one:
moveto "@(png|jpg)"
Extended glob patterns are documented in the bash manual; they consist of one of the characters *, +, ?, @, or ! followed by a parenthesized list of patterns separated by |. The initial character meanings are mostly familiar:
* zero or more repetitions of any of the patterns
+ one or more repetitions of any of the patterns
? nothing or exactly one of the patterns
@ exactly one of the patterns
! does not match any of the patterns
If you wanted to get fancy, you could assemble the pattern yourself:
moveto() {
local pattern="@($(tr ' ' '|'<<<"$*"))"
local filename
for filename in *; do
case "${filename##*.}" in
$pattern) echo "!";; # echo statement for debugging
esac
done
}
moveto png jpg
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