How do I write some (bash) shell script to convert all matching filenames in directory to command-line options?

Question

Apparently the answer to my question "Can I restrict nose coverage output to directory (rather than package)?" is no, but I can pass a --coverage-package=PACKAGE option to nose with the package name of each .py file in the directory.

So for example, if the directory contains:

foo.py
bar.py
baz.py

...then I would need to use the command:

nosetests --with-coverage --coverage-package=foo --coverage-package=bar --coverage-package=baz

So my question is, can someone write some shell script code (preferably sh or bash) to take all the filenames in the current directory with a .py extension and generate the above command-line (with the .py extensions removed)? My bash skills are quite limited. (I'm tempted to just do it in Python.)

Answer 1

nosetests --with-coverage $(for f in *.py; do echo --cover-package="${f%.*}"; done)

The trick is here is using parameter substitution to remove the file extension.

${f%.*}

Answer 2

nosetests --with-coverage `ls *.py|sed -e 's/^/--cover-package=' -e 's/\.py$//'`

Answer 3

And if you care to do it correct (which means, don't allow wordsplitting to cut your filenames apart or unexpected globbing to expand to random filenames), use an array:

files=(*.py)
packages=("${files[@]/%.py/}")
nosetests --with-coverage "${packages[@]/#/--coverage-package=}"