Unix - Nested Loop. One loop to untar then another to inspect each file in directory

Question

I'm trying to loop round a load of tar files and then move the extracted files into a new folder, inspect them and delete them before moving onto the next tar.

Code is below:

for i in *
do
  tar -zxvf $i 
  mv *TTF* encoded
  cd encoded
  for j in *
  do
    echo $j
  done

  rm -f *TTF*
  cd ..
done

When it gets to the nested loop, it asks if I want to display all x possibilities. Clearly something is going wrong. Any ideas?

Answer 1

Did you write this in a text editor, then try to paste it into a terminal, by any chance? Did you use tabs to indent the lines? If so, try changing tabs to spaces, or just save the file as a shell script and then run it.

(The tab key invokes completion, which displays the "display all x possibilities" message if there are lots of completions that match.)

Answer 2

Run the 'cd' command and its following actions in a sub-shell, which means you don't have to do 'cd ..'. Also, it would probably be better to extract each tar file directly in the sub-directory.

for i in *.tar.gz
do
  mkdir encoded
  (
  cd encoded
  tar -zxvf ../$i 
  for j in *
  do
    echo $j
  done
  )
  rm -fr encoded
done

This assumes only that the tar file doesn't contain any names with '..' in the paths of the files, which is very uncommon.