Andy(m)

I am using the BASH command 'find' for to list each file in the directory and sub directories. I would like to send each of these files to formail to be converted to .mbox. However, My output is only all the file paths instead of a seperate converted file for each. Here is the BASH line I am using.

find | cat | while read line; do /usr/bin/formail > mail/FindMbox/$file.mbox; done

It creats a file name 20.mbox (i assume my $file syntax is incorrect) which contains only the output of the find command.

Any idea on how I can get /usr/bin/formail to look at each line and convert the seperate files?

JKR

You could use awk.

Andy(m)

I tried using awk... but it didn't really make a difference. I wrote a script to do an ls -1 on each folder and then pipe the lines to formail. But, that still doesnt work. It just gives me a single file output and doesnt actually convert the data.

When i run formail for just one messages, i still cant extract the data. So, it doesnt really make a difference if i can loop them or not.

JKR

Sorry, I don't have formail installed on my system, so I can't try it myself. However, I'd try to cut down the problem in pieces to find out where the problem is.

To do this, I'd first redirect the output of the find command into a file list, like
ls -1R | grep -iv "./" >filelist.file (note that it is ls minus one big R, not minus small L)

Look at the created file to see if the output really is what you'd like to pipe ontu your formail command.

In a second step, let's see if the formail command works on your input.
head 1 filelist.file | formail

In a third step, do something like
for i in {1..`wc -l filelist.file`}
do
head $i filelist.file
done

and in a last step
for i in {1..`wc -l filelist.file`}
do
head $i filelist.file | formail
done

This way you'll find out which step in your command pipe is broken, and you can correct it step by step.

Note that "do something like" means that my syntax is incorrect.

From your first post I guess that your "find" is shorthand for something much longer like find my_directory -n mynames* -exec .... The output of your find command will be a list of files. You pipe it onto a cat. cat will show you the content of one file (as opposed to a list of files). There might be more than one problem in your command chain, so I think it's best to tackle them step by step.

Good luck!

Andy(m)

thanks, I will try this now.

wrote a different script that works, but is similar to your advice.. thanks!

JKR

I'm glad that it worked for you. Have a look at the -exec part of man find, too, it could be useful in this kind of situations.