mjhjmtu

I have a script that takes filenames as positional parameters. I perform a few operations on these and then tar them. Currently my script is not working. The echo line is there for debugging purposes.

Please clarify this statement

But when I try to tar with in the script if can file the file I want to tar.

SNIPPET

while [[ $# > 0 ]]; do
 key="$1"
 shift
 files=$files" ""$key"
 done

echo tar -cvf backup.tar $files
tar -cvf backup.tar $files

OUTPUT:

tar -cvf backup.tar "test.txt"
tar: "test.txt": Cannot stat: No such file or directory
tar: Exiting with failure status due to previous errors

I am using the double quotes around the filename (test.txt) as I want to handle files with spaces.

If I were to remove the quotes in the script ("), it will work but then I can’t handle filenames with spaces.

Any ideas?

If you are always using all the params then just call tar like this: tar -cvf backup.tar "$@". Otherwise, if you are selecting a subset (though you don't show it) then build up the file list in an array like this:

declare -a files
while [[ $# > 0 ]]; do
 key="$1"
 shift
 # assume some filtering goes on here
 files+=("$key")
 done

tar -cvf backup.tar "$files[@]"