mjhjmtu

I want to loop through only specific directories and delete the first line of files given as input parameters in those directories.

My input parameters should be:

• 
  -i [input_directory] - root directory


• 
  -n [directory] directories to check for files


• file ending

Run as

sh -i /main/folder/ -n (sub1|sub2|sub6) .txt

Script should only delete header for *.txt files in sub1, sub2 and sub6 folders under /main/folder/.

Now I have below script which loops through all folders and deletes header but I am not sure how to loop through only specified folder

for $file in $i/*/*.txt do
 sed '1,1d' $file
done

Please let me know if there will be any use if we change the way we input parameters.

My intuition about commands that let you specify a working directory is, that it is the first parameter. That you have correct, although you could lose the -i command switch.

Secondly any options with multiple values (like the multiple specific sub-directories you want to search in) should be last. That way they don't interfere too much with the other ones.

I would propose to call your command like this:

~$ mycommand /my/root/dir "txt" -sdirs sub1 sub2 sub6

Bash and maybe sh as well has the shift builtin, which lets you shift through the given arguments. You could extract the necessary information from the commandline like so:

#!/bin/bash

WORK_DIR="$1"
shift # shifts $2 to $1
FILE_END="$1"
shift
if [ "-sdirs" = "$1" ]; then
 shift # get to the sub dirs
 while [ -n "$1" ]; do # tests if there is a sub dir
 # *do your magic here*
 # $1 should be a sub dir
 # $WORK_DIR/$1/*$FILE_END for example

 # to the next one, break if nothing left
 shift || break
 done
else
 echo "No sub directories specified"
 exit 1
fi

This is what I would do off the top of my head. More error handling is appropriate and left as an exercise to the reader.