Find all shell scripts from a folder and execute them in order

Question

I have a folder with a lot of shell scripts to configure my server.

My main script is named "setup.sh" and all others scripts are named 0.script.sh, 1.script.sh.... More generally N.SCRIPT_NAME.sh, where N is the execution number.

So, I would like to list all shell scripts from the folder, and execute them in the order specified by the N numbers.

Answer 1

There's probably an easier way to glob filenames in sequence with zsh, but here's a brute-force way in bash:

for script in ?.script*.sh ??.script*.sh ???.script*.sh ????.script*.sh
do
  printf "Executing script: %s\n" "$script"
  ./"$script"
done

This assumes that you have no more than 9999 scripts -- or, more precisely, none with more than 4 numbers (characters) in the prefix part of the filename.

It also assumes that the prefixes are numbered -- it will pick up scripts named, e.g. go.script_X.sh, if you had one. To work around that, replace the ? with [0-9]'s:

for f in [0-9].script*.sh [0-9][0-9].script*.sh ...

The shell's natural globbing mechanism will be to sort the resulting filenames alphabetically, which results in them sorting numerically as well. The various filenames are spelled out in increasing scale so that "9" sorts before "101" & etc.

In zsh, glob the filenames in numerical order of their prefix with:

for script in *.script*.sh(oe_'REPLY=${REPLY%%.*}'_n)
do
  printf "Executing script: %s\n" "$script"
  ./"$script"
done

The globbing expansion first picks up all of the *.script*.sh files, then says to order (sort) them using the expression that extracts the prefix by stripping as much of "dot followed by anything" as possible, and using a numeric sort.

Answer 2

If the files names are simple (no spaces, no newlines, no characters that ls needs to encode with a ?) then, maybe !! , you can get away with:

IFS=$' \t\n'; for s in $(ls -v folder/*.script.sh); do printf '%s\n' "$s"; done

In this case, ls will sort by version number -v (quite similar to numeric value).

But in general, it is a bad idea to parse (process) the output of ls.

This is better:

shopt -s nullglob
for   s   in   folder/?{,?{,?{,?}}}.script.sh
do    printf '%s\n' "$s"
done

Which will list (in alphabetical order, which is equivalent to numerical order if the characters before .script.sh are only numbers) by each character up to four characters (numbers).

The idea is that brace expansions happen before pathname expansion. The brace expansion will convert and expand the ?{,?{,?{,?}}}.script.sh to

?.script.sh ??.script.sh ???.script.sh ????.script.sh

And then, the pathname expansion will find all file that match each pattern sorting each pattern in turn.

If none of the options above are a solution, you will need to use sort:

printf '%s\n' *.script.sh | sort -n | xargs echo

Which becomes even more complex if there is a folder prefix:

printf '%s\n' folder/*.script.sh | sort -n -k 1.8 | xargs echo

Where the 8 is the number of characters (bytes) in the word folder and the following / plus one (1).

You will need to replace the echo with sh to execute each script. This will work correctly if no file name contains newlines.

If it is possible that filenames may contain newlines, use this:

printf '%s\0' folder/*.script.sh | sort -zn -k 1.8 | xargs -0 -I{} echo '{}'

Again, replace the echo with a sh (or bash) to execute the scripts.