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archnemesis

Member

Registered: 2009-11-27

Posts: 53

how do I enclose each line returned by grep in quotes?

here is what i want to do:

 cp `ls | grep -i stuff` ~/zzTMP/

but the problem is the filenames returned contain spaces and are therefore interpreted by copy as many separate files per line, none of which match. So can i somehow enclose the lines returned by grep in single quotes?

fsckd

Forum Fellow

Registered: 2009-06-15

Posts: 4,173

Re: how do I enclose each line returned by grep in quotes?

here is what i want to do:

 cp `ls | grep -i stuff` ~/zzTMP/

but the problem is the filenames returned contain spaces and are therefore interpreted by copy as many separate files per line, none of which match. So can i somehow enclose the lines returned by grep in single quotes?

I would use find and xargs but if you really insist then use sed or whatever: cp `ls | grep -i stuff | sed "s/^\(.*\)\$/'\1'/"` ~/zzTMP/.

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IgnorantGuru

Member

Registered: 2009-11-09

Posts: 640

Website

Re: how do I enclose each line returned by grep in quotes?

wouldn't this be equivalent:

cp *stuff*  ~/zzTMP/

or if you really need grep you could use

IFS=$'\n'; for f in `ls -1 | grep -i stuff`; do cp "$f" ~/zzTMP/; done; IFS=" "

Last edited by IgnorantGuru (2009-11-30 03:36:15)

IgnorantGuru

Member

Registered: 2009-11-09

Posts: 640

Website

Re: how do I enclose each line returned by grep in quotes?

Yeah find is probably better

find -maxdepth 1 -type f -iname "*stuff*" -execdir cp {} ~/zzTMP/ \;