I am trying to write a script that will take a list of filenames, operate on them individually and output a changed file name - mainly for renaming a large number of files.

So far I have

TARGET="$(ls -1 |)"

for FILE in "$TARGET"; do

NEW=$(echo "$FILE" | 'do some stuff to file')

mv $FILE $NEW

done

but all the filenames are kept as one long string in $FILE, and $NEW, so I can't do anything with them once I have changed them. How can I get the script to see each filename separately?
Thanks

**************************
for file in `ls -l|grep "^-"|awk '{print $9}'`
do
# do whatever u want to do on file
echo $file
#1st option
echo $file>${file}Newname
#2nd option
mv $file newfile
done
**********************
ur code seems correct except $NEW ,bcz if u allready defined NEW as a variable then it will alws take the constant value of that variable ..which is defined before the loop

Remove the double quotes in:

Code:

...
for FILE in $TARGET; do
...

thanks guys,

Don't the double quotes just maintain the format? So everything remains on separate lines instead of being placed on one?

The double quotes will make it one parameter e.g.
#!/usr/bin/ksh
echo $1
echo $2
echo $3
# s1 "a b c" d e
a b c
d
e
# s1 a b c d e
a
b
c