TOPIC: WILDCARD CHARACTER
Unzipping more than one file at a time in Linux and macOS
10th September 2024To me, it sounded like a task for shell scripting, but I wanted to extract three zip archives in one go. They had come from Google Drive and contained different splits of the files that I needed, raw images from a camera. However, I found a more succinct method than the line of code that you see below (it is intended for the BASH shell):
for z in *.zip; do; unzip "$z"; done
That loops through each file that matches a glob string. All I needed was something like this:
unzip '*.zip'
Without embarking on a search, I got close but have not quoted the search string. Without the quoting, it was not working for me. To be sure that I was extracting more than I needed, I made the wildcard string more specific for my case.
Once the extraction was complete, I moved the files into a Lightroom Classic repository for working on them later. All this happened on an iMac, but the extraction itself should work on any UNIX-based operating system, so long as the shell supports it.
Searching file contents using PowerShell
25th October 2018Having made plenty of use of grep on the Linux/UNIX command and findstr on the legacy Windows command line, I wondered if PowerShell could be used to search the contents of files for a text string. Usefully, this turns out to be the case, but I found that the native functionality does not use what I have used before. The form of the command is given below:
Select-String -Path <filename search expression> -Pattern "<search expression>" > <output file>
While you can have the output appear on the screen, it always seems easier to send it to a file for subsequent use, and that is what I am doing above. The input to the -Path switch can be a filename or a wildcard expression, while that to the -Pattern can be a text string enclosed in quotes or a regular expression. Given that it works well once you know what to do, here is an example:
Select-String -Path *.sas -Pattern "proc report" > c:\temp\search.txt
The search.txt file then includes both the file information and the text that has been found for the sake of checking that you have what you want. What you do next is up to you.