How do I use command line arguments in bash?

This script moves all the doc files to a specified directory. I have managed to put an argument but the problem I am facing is putting the full path where the scripts are moving to, for example I want to run the script like this below

./loo -d then path where im moving the files (i.e ./loo -d the second argument where files are moving to) 

this is my code

#!/bin/bash From="/home/elg19/lone/doc" To="/home/elg19/documents" if [ $1 = -d ]; then cd "$From" for i in pdf txt doc; do find . -type f -name "*.${i}" -exec mv "{}" "$To" \; done fi 

3 Answers

You need getopts. getopts is a library designed to handle commandline arguments for you, and is generally available in many languages. In bash, you use it like this:

This is borrowed from a tutorial I found:

From="/home/elg19/lone/doc" To="/home/elg19/documents" while getopts "d:" optionName; do case "$optionName" in d) To="$OPTARG";; [?]) exit 255;; esac done [[ -d "$To" ]] || exit 255 cd "$From" for i in pdf txt doc; do find . -type f -name "*.${i}" -exec mv "{}" "$To" \; done 

This is untested, but basically it's just your script with the option to override the "$To" argument with getopts.

The [?] bit tells it to exit if any unrecognised options are found.

FWIW, rsync will do this for you

rsync --filter="+ *.doc" --filter="+ *.pdf" --filter="+ *.txt" --filter="- *" ~lone/doc/* ~/documents/ 

You can make an alias in .bashrc if you wish

alias backup='rsync --filter="+ *.doc" --filter="+ *.pdf" --filter="+ *.txt" --filter="- *" ~lone/doc/* ~/documents/' 

If you need more then *.doc, add to the --filer="+ *.txt" ;)

See my comment if you want to debug your script. Your problem in your script may be as simple as your conditional if [ $1 = -d ]

try

if [ -d "$1" ]; then 

But I can not tell from your script what options you are passing and why (you defined your directories in your script).

With your most recent comment

#!/bin/bash From="/home/elg19/lone/doc" #To="/home/elg19/documents" while getopts "d:" optionName; do case "$optionName" in d) To="$OPTARG";; [?]) exit 255;; esac done [[ -d "$To" ]] || exit 255 for i in pdf txt doc; do find $From -type f -name "*.${i}" -exec mv "{}" "$To" \; done