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up vote 3 down vote favorite

I want to use my script on many files sometimes.

I used this for the purpose:

for etminput in $1
do
    #process
done

But this just gives the first input. How can I do the process on every wildcard matches?

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2 Answers 2

up vote 9 down vote accepted

If you want to loop over all the arguments to your script, in any Bourne like shell, it's:

for i do
  something with "$i"
done

You could also do:

for i in "$@"; do
  something with "$i"
done

but it's longer and not as portable (though is for modern shells).

Note that:

for i; do
  something with "$i"
done

is neither Bourne nor POSIX so should be avoided (though it works in many shells)

For completeness, in non-Bourne shells:

csh/tcsh

@ i = 1
while ($i <= $#argv)
  something with $argv[$i]:q
  @ i++
end

You cannot use:

foreach i ($argv:q)
  something with $i:q
end

because that skips empty arguments

rc/akanga

for (i) something with $i

(rc generally is what shells should be like).

es

for (i=$*) something with $i

(es is rc on steroids).

fish

for i in $argv
  something with $i
end

zsh

Though it will accept the Bourne syntax, it also supports shorter ones like:

for i ("$@") something with "$i"
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up vote 0 down vote 
#!/bin/bash

n=1
echo "$0 got $# args..."
while [ $# -gt 0 ] ;do
  echo "$n: $1"
  shift
  n=$(( $n + 1 ))
done

Alternatively, look up 'Listing arguments with $* and $@'
in http://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/abs-guide.html
which will elaborate on many aspects of these.

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