shell scripting: search/replace & check file exist
- by johndashen
I have a perl script (or any executable) E which will take a file foo.xml and write a file foo.txt. I use a Beowulf cluster to run E for a large number of XML files, but I'd like to write a simple job server script in shell (bash) which doesn't overwrite existing txt files.
I'm currently doing something like
#!/bin/sh
PATTERN="[A-Z]*0[1-2][a-j]"; # this matches foo in all cases
todo=`ls *.xml | grep $PATTERN -o`;
isdone=`ls *.txt | grep $PATTERN -o`;
whatsleft=todo - isdone; # what's the unix magic?
#tack on the .xml prefix with sed or something
#and then call the job server;
jobserve E "$whatsleft";
and then I don't know how to get the difference between $todo and $isdone. I'd prefer using sort/uniq to something like a for loop with grep inside, but I'm not sure how to do it (pipes? temporary files?)
As a bonus question, is there a way to do lookahead search in bash grep?
To clarify:
so the simplest way to do what i'm asking is (in pseudocode)
for i in `/bin/ls *.xml`
do
replace xml suffix with txt
if [that file exists]
add to whatsleft list
end
done
