Passing shell script variables to find

Question

I'm working on recursively renaming directories and files in a directory.

alan/
    alan_0001.txt
    alan_0002.txt
andy/
    andy_0001.txt
    andy_0002.txt
andytwo/
    andytwo_0001.txt
    andytwo_0002.txt

I have a tab delimited file (hopefully reproduced here) that supplies new information for file names; eg

alan     123_123     Alan's Place
andy     124_010     Andy's Place
andytwo     125_001     Andy's Second Place

I've worked out the following shell script, but I'm not sure how to pass values from early in the script to find at the end.

#!/bin/sh

FILE="sample-list.txt"

exec 3<&0
exec 0<$FILE

while read line
do
    echo $line
    oldName=`echo "$line" | cut -f1`
    adminDB=`echo "$line" | cut -f2`
    title=`echo "$line" | cut -f3`
    echo "$oldName is old, his number is $adminDB, and the title is $title"
    echo "renaming files"
#    echo find -name '{$oldName}*' 
    echo "`find ./ -name '${oldName}*'`"
done
exec 0<&3

I'd like to throw the wildcard on $oldName to catch the andy_0001, _0002 files and rename them with find ./ -name ${oldName}* -exec rename $oldName $adminDB {} \\;

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

I think you just need to use double quotes:

find ./ -name "${oldName}*" -exec rename $oldName $adminDB {} \;

---

You can also save some code by letting the shell split the input line into fields:

while read oldName adminDB title; do
    ...
done

You would lose the original whitespace from the full line, so if that is important, ignore this unsolicited advice.