Batch-operations with 'find' and 'for'

Here I want to share some quick and dirty small scripts for different use cases. These in most cases are one-liners.

… in a single FOR-loop

This example batch-decrypt password-protected PDF files. You’ll need pdftk for this.

for file in ./**/*(.); do if [[ $file =~ .*.pdf ]] pdftk $file input_pw PROMPT output ${file%.pdf}-decrypted.pdf ; done

parameter	description
${file}	variable which contains the filename
.*.pdf	the input file extension
${file%.pdf}-decrypted.pdf	this cuts off the extension and adds a “-decrypted” plus the extension

… with find command

My use-case for this is copying specific games from my NAS to my handheld’s sd card.

find /path/to/games/roms/gba -type f -iname "*Street Fighter*.gba" -exec cp {} /path/to/sdcard/roms/gba \; 

parameter	description
-type f	determines the file type f = file and d = directory
-iname “”	anything that matches this string (similar to windows)
-exec {}\;	do with found files, {} = contains the filename, \; requiered (marks end of script)