I have a script for school that mimics the cp command. Part of the assignment is to modify the script so that the while loop (that assigns stdin to the variable filelist) is instead done with sed.
The last argument needs to be saved to variable to because that could be a directory depending on other user input in the script.
while [ "$#" -gt 1 ]
do
filelist="$filelist $1"
shift
done
to="$1"
The finished product is below. Is that good? How could I polish it up?
filelist=$(echo $* | sed 's/ [^ ]*$//')
to=$(echo $* | sed 's/^.* \([^ ]*\)$/\1/')
whileloop produces different output, " 1 2 3" vs. "1 2 3" by thesedcall. – ferada Dec 5 '14 at 13:52toassignment.len=$#; to=${!len}orlen=$#; a=("$@"); to=${a[$# - 1]}. – Etan Reisner Dec 5 '14 at 16:39