linux appending text gives command not found

Question

When I try this simple script:

#!/bin/bash
#append csv

FILES= /home/stef/test/*

for f in $FILES do
        cat $f >> ~/test.txt done

I get following error:

./append.sh: line 4: /home/stef/test/test2.txt: Permission denied.

What am I doing wrong?

Do you have read permission of `/home/stef/test/test2.txt`? It looks like you don't. — Vala, Sep 14 '12 at 10:09
You apparently do not have read permissions for `/home/stef/test/test2.txt`. — lanzz, Sep 14 '12 at 10:10
It's not just the directory permissions that matter, but the file itself. — Vala, Sep 14 '12 at 10:11

sapht · Accepted Answer · 2012-09-14T10:41:46.647

5

Replace

FILES= /home/stef/test/*

with

FILES=/home/stef/test/*

The script is trying to evaluate the first match of /home/stef/test/*. It says permission denied because the file is not executable.

./append.sh: line 4: /home/stef/test/test2.txt: Permission denied.

That's line 4. Try with FOO= * in a non-empty directory.

And your for ... do; done syntax is borked as well, done needs a separator (; or newline) and so does "do". That's not what produces this erroe message however.

edited Sep 14 '12 at 10:41

answered Sep 14 '12 at 10:17

sapht

2,789
18
16

@sapht it looks like mistake made by editor not author. Main question in antoher. – Laser Sep 14 '12 at 10:20
1

No, bash is picky about whitespace in variable assignments, which causes this issue. – sapht Sep 14 '12 at 10:28
@sehe My tests suggest that it ignores the variable assigment and tries to evaluate the expanded wildcard. In a dir with the file "bar" it would try to execute "bar" from the bin path. I've never seen whitespace after = in production code and consider it an syntax pitfall. – sapht Sep 14 '12 at 10:38
@sapht Thanks for providing the rationale. +1 – sehe Sep 14 '12 at 11:18
@sapht: you can prefix simple commands with variable assignments to effect changes to that commnands environments. `FOO= cmd` simply runs `cmd` with `FOO` set to the empty string in its environment; `FOO` in the current environment is left unchanged. – chepner Sep 14 '12 at 13:03

Laser · Answer 2 · 2012-09-14T10:27:53.043

2

You need to do this changes in your code:

#!/bin/bash
#append csv

FILES=/some_path/*

for f in $FILES
do
        cat $f >> ~/test.txt
done

Don't forget to remove whitepsace before path in FILE line,

edited Sep 14 '12 at 10:27

answered Sep 14 '12 at 10:09

Laser

6,652
8
54
85

sehe · Answer 3 · 2012-09-14T11:19:06.633

0

Missing statement delimiter: Fix it either like

for f in $FILES do
        cat $f >> ~/test.txt 
done

Or

for f in $FILES do
        cat $f >> ~/test.txt; done

edited Sep 14 '12 at 11:19

answered Sep 14 '12 at 10:20

sehe

374,641
47
450
633

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Sep 14 '12 at 13:37

Note that if any of your filenames have whitespace, you will have problems. When you iterate over a variable with for, you are iterating over the whitespace-separated words in that variable. To safely iterate over files, regardless whether they have spaces in the names, don't store the list of files in a plain variable.

Most straight-forward way:

for f in /home/stef/test/*; do
  # ...

If you want to hold the filenames in some kind of container, you need to use an array:

files=( /home/stef/test/* )
for f in "${files[@]}"; do
  # ...

linux appending text gives command not found

4 Answers4

Linked