Bash And Exclusions in a List

February 5, 2014 admin

Just a quick snippet on doing exclusions when you loop through a list.

DIRS=`ls -l --time-style="long-iso" $MYDIR | egrep '^d' | awk '{print $8}'`
EXCLUDELIST="mail Mail"

for EXCLUDE in $EXCLUDELIST
do
    DIRS=`echo $DIRS | sed "s/\b$EXCLUDE\b//g"`
done

for DIR in $DIRS
do
    echo  ${DIR} :
done

For some reason on Solaris sed had an issue with "\b" so I adjusted to sed "s/$EXCLUDE//g". Shown as follow:

#Linux:
$ echo "d1 d2 d3" | sed "s/\bd2\b//g"
d1  d3

# Solaris Fails:
# echo "d1 d2 d3" | sed "s/\bd2\b//g"
d1 d2 d3

# Solaris Works
# echo "d1 d2 d3" | sed "s/d2//g"
d1  d3