In line one: What is '' file?
According to help read
, that ''
is an argument to the -d
parameter:
-d delim continue until the first character of
DELIM is read, rather than newline
In line six: What does the empty space do in < < (find).
There are two separate operators there. There is <
, the standard I/O redirection operator, followed by a <(...)
construct, which is a bash-specific construct that performs process substitution:
Process Substitution
Process substitution is supported on systems that
support named pipes (FIFOs) or the /dev/fd method of naming
open files. It takes the form of <(list) or >(list). The
process list is run with its input or output connected
to a FIFO or some file in /dev/fd...
So this is is sending the output of the find
command into the do
loop.
Are the < redirects, as usual? If they are, what does it mean to redirect into do block?
Redirect into a loop means that any command inside that loop that
reads from stdin
will read from the redirected input source. As a
side effect, everything inside that loop runs in a subshell, which has
implications with respect to variable scope: variables set inside the
loop won't be visible outside the loop.
Can someone help parse this out? Is this the right way to iterate over files of a certain kind in a directory?
For the record, I would typically do this by piping find
to xargs
,
although which solution is best depends to a certain extend on what
you're trying to do. The two examples in your question do completely
different things, and it's not clear what you're actually trying to
accomplish.
But for example:
find $src -maxdepth 1 -name '*.md' -print0 |
xargs -0 -iDOC wc -w DOC
This would run wc
on all the *.md
files. The -print0
to find
(and the -0
to xargs
) permit this command to correctly handle
filenames with embedded whitespace (e.g., This is my file.md
). If
you know you don't have any of those, you just do:
find $src -maxdepth 1 -name '*.md' |
xargs -iDOC wc -w DOC