Running Commands on files sequentially

Question

I'm trying to figure out how to write a script that will run a command on files in a directory sequentially with a pause for each command to wait to complete. Here's an example.

cat >> text.txt && cat >> text2.txt

Above command works for both files as long as I manually type each file. My personal project has 559 files, i.e., text1.txt...text559.txt.

My last resort is to pull up a list of the file names in the terminal and go to my text editor and just build the script for a one time run. I would like to automate it if possible so any suggestions on how to get started would be appreciated.

Answer 1

You probably want to look at a for loop. In bash, it would look something like:

for file in "${list_of_files[@]}"
do
  run_command "$file"
done

The "${list_of_files[@]}" can be an array that you set elsewhere, or you may replace this with a literal list of filenames, or it can be a filename globbing pattern such as text*.txt.

This loop will run run_command with a single parameter, the $file that you're working on in that loop iteration, and will wait for each run_command to complete before moving on to the next loop iteration.