Noodlesoft Forums

I am trying to automate the collection of individual .txt files into a single, larger file. To do this, I wrote a shell script that works when I run it in terminal:

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for f in *.txt ; do
    cat "$f" >> COMPILED
    echo "***###***" >> COMPILED
done
rm *.txt

I have a number of subfolders I'd like this to apply to and keep those compiled documents in their original subfolders. I have a go into subfolders rule in place on the parent folder. I then made a simple rule that matches any file with the .txt extension

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If all of the following conditions are met:
      Extension is .txt
Do the following to the matched file or folder:
     Run shell script embedded script

Obviously, I don't want the rule to run on the .txt file, but run in any directory that contains .txt files.

When I run this, I get a COMPILED document in the parent folder that is empty even though there are text files in the subfolders. I did some reading and found that I need to tell the shell script to CD to the folder of interest. When I followed up on this, I found some issues with the $0 and $1 variables. Instead of giving a file name, I get the entire contents of the text document. For example, $0 gives all of the code for the shell script and $1 gives the one line of text I put in the test.txt. When I use $0 or $1 in the terminal, I get the expected script name/first argument.

I think I need a way to get the path for the directory containing the text files to be compiled, but all the examples I've seen for this are based on using $1. Is this an issue with my shell script or the way I'm setting up the hazel rules?

Thanks for your help

Have your rule match the folder and not the files. If you want to match folders with text files then do the following:

- Hold down option while clicking the + button to create a new condition. This will create a nested condition.
- Set the target of the nested condition to either "any sub-file" or "all sub-files" depending on your needs.
- Add the condition to match text files under that.

That will match folders that contain txt files which seems like what you want here.

Thanks so much, this worked.

Any of its subfiles or subfolders:
Extension is .txt

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cd "$1"

for f in *.txt ; do
    cat "$f" >> COMPILED
    echo "***###***" >> COMPILED
done
rm *.txt

Runs this script in any folder with text files like I want it to.