Re: Recursion and shell functions

[Oliver Kiddle <okiddle@yahoo.co.uk>]

On 10 Oct, you wrote:

>     First of all, please excuse this a-bit-off-topic question, but I
> need to know if a feature available in zsh is portable.
> 
>     I need to do recursion in a directory tree and have two options;
> first one is doing a 'for' loop recursively calling the shell
> function which performs the actions:


> setting the permissions. This may seems unreasonable (two
> recursions...) but it's necessary since the recursive function call
> overwrites local variables, and I *cannot* set them as local, since
> 'local' is not a portable keyword :((( I need 

If you know that you will at least have ksh88, you can get local
variables by using the function name { ... } syntax for functions and
using typeset to declare variables.

The bourne shell doesn't have local variables except for the
positional parameters and you can use them. I think this will be
portable:

func() {
  set *
  while [ "$1" ]; do
    if [ -d "$1" ]; then
      cd $1
      func
      cd ..
    fi
    shift
  done
}

Something like find is going to be more reliable though.

Oliver

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