how to avoid non printable characters in for each loops (shell scripting)

Question

I wrote a shell script as follows

for i in `readlink -f rec*`:
do
    cd $i
    pwd
    cd ..
    pwd
done

The following are the details of corresponding directories:

readlink -f rec*

/home/sandilya/part655gib/recup_dir.1
/home/sandilya/part655gib/recup_dir.2
/home/sandilya/part655gib/recup_dir.3
/home/sandilya/part655gib/recup_dir.4
/home/sandilya/part655gib/recup_dir.5

---

the script output:

/home/sandilya/part655gib/recup_dir.1
/home/sandilya/part655gib
/home/sandilya/part655gib/recup_dir.2
/home/sandilya/part655gib
/home/sandilya/part655gib/recup_dir.3
/home/sandilya/part655gib
/home/sandilya/part655gib/recup_dir.4
/home/sandilya/part655gib
mvrec.sh: 5: cd: can't cd to /home/sandilya/part655gib/recup_dir.5:
/home/sandilya/part655gib
/home/sandilya

---

The problem is that last directory is left out.. I was expecting that the last entry is combined with a non printable character. Permissions are all okay with the directories. Please help me out of this mess. Thanks in advance

Answer 1

The problem is more apparent than it looks. There is no non-printable character.

Let's take a look a cd error message from dash, the shell you're using instead of bash:

$ cd somewhere
dash: 5: cd: can't cd to somewhere
                                  ^-- Nothing follows the path

Now look at your error message:

mvrec.sh: 5: cd: can't cd to /home/sandilya/part655gib/recup_dir.5:
                                                Spurious colon ---^

And where does this colon come from?

for i in `readlink -f rec*`:
                           ^--- Right here

Delete it, and it'll work.

(Note that this is not canonical or entirely correct code, and people's suggestions about for f in rec* loops and subshells still apply.)