Bash shell script to flip through directories and perform a few actions

Question

Good afternoon, I have a question about a script I am having problems with. I did something similar a couple of years ago and based this on that (which was on a different server). I need to run the script from a directory that has a number of directories in it and for each directory have it create a directory and change it's ownership. The script is:

#!/bin/bash
for DIR in *;
do 
mkdir $DIR/photos2; 
chown apache:apache $DIR/photos2; 
chmod 777 $DIR/photos2; 
done

When trying to run I get - syntax error near unexpected token `do'

I'm sure it is something silly I'm missing, any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

You probably want to do something like this:

#!/bin/bash
for DIR in *; do
    if [ -d "$DIR" ]; then 
        mkdir "$DIR/photos2"
        chown apache:apache "$DIR/photos2"
        chmod 777 "$DIR/photos2"
    fi
done

• The error with "do" is because bash is line-oriented and expects the "do" to be on the same line. You can, of course, put a \ at the end of the line instead. EDIT: this is not correct. A not-so-educated guess, presumably.
• The semicolons are not necessary when commands are on different lines.
• Quotes around $DIR is necessary in case you have spaces in any filenames.

Answer 2

either

for DIR in *
do

or

for DIR in *; do

Answer 3

I have seen funny things happen with scripts when they were in DOS format.
Are you by any chance writing code on a Windows platform and trying to run it from a bash shell somewhere else?

On the bash shell, there will usually be a command called dos2unix, if you find it, try running,

dos2unix scriptname

and, then run the script again.

---

One more check, are you sure you have an error saying "unexpected token 'do'" and not 'done'?
Anyways, I suggest you read up for loop at the bash guide

---

Meanwhile, this should do your work from the base directory (while your filenames do not have SPACE characters).

#!/bin/bash
for DIR in $(find . -type d);
do 
    mkdir $DIR/photos2; 
    chown apache:apache $DIR/photos2; 
    chmod 777 $DIR/photos2; 
done