I want to capture the output of the command below in a variable.
Command:
find . -iname 'FIL*'.TXT
The output is :
./FILE1.TXT
I want to capture './FILE1.TXT' into 'A' variable. But when I am trying
A=`find . -iname 'FIL*'.TXT`
then this command is displaying the data of the file. But I want ./FILE1.TXT value in the variable A.
# ls *.txt
test1.txt test.txt
# find ./ -maxdepth 1 -iname "*.txt"
./test1.txt
./test.txt
# A=$(find ./ -maxdepth 1 -iname "*.txt")
# echo $A
./test1.txt ./test.txt
You can ignore -maxdepth 1 if you want to. I had to use it for this example.
Or with a single file:
# ls *.txt
test.txt
# find ./ -maxdepth 1 -iname "*.txt"
./test.txt
# A=$(find ./ -maxdepth 1 -iname "*.txt")
# echo $A
./test.txt
Do you try ?
A="`find . -iname 'FIL*'.TXT`"
and
A="`find . -iname 'FIL*'.TXT -print`"
A file does not have any value, but does have a content. Use the following to display that content.
find . -iname 'FIL*'.TXT -exec cat {} \;
If you want all the contents (of all such files) in a variable, then
A=$(find . -iname 'FIL*'.TXT -exec cat {} \;)
BTW you could have used
find . -iname 'FIL*.TXT' -print0 | xargs -0 cat
If you want the names of such files in a variable, try
A=$(find . -iname 'FILE*.txt' -print)
BTW, on some several recent interactive shells (zsh, bash version 4 but not earlier versions) just write
A=**/FILE*.txt
My feeling is that the ** feature is by itself worth switching to a newer shell, but it is just my opinion.
Also, don't forget that files may have several or no names. Read about inodes ...
**/ is an extension in some shells, like zsh or bash version 4 but not version 3. You could consider using zsh
$(...)notation for Command Substitution, but shouldn't affect things. You could use-printas part of thefindcommand, but it shouldn't matter. It might be that you're mishandling the code that reports the file name; it should be justecho "$A"orprintf "%s\n" $Aor something similar. Be wary of spaces (or, worse, newlines) in file names.