Basename gives extra operand error

Question

I 'm using the following script to merge few pcap files into one using mergecap command. But when I run it it gives me a 'basename: extra operand /mnt/md0/capture/DCN/dcn_2014_02_04_00_11_47_598.pcap' error The script is as follows

#!/bin/bash
#find last 15 files older than +5 days
FILES=$(find /mnt/md0/capture/DCN/ -maxdepth 1 -type f -name "*.pcap"  -mtime +5 -print0 | xargs -0 ls -lt | tail -15 | awk '{print $8}')

N=15
TAG1=$(basename ${FILES[0]} | sed 's/.pcap//')
TAG2=$(basename ${FILES[$N-1]} | sed 's/.pcap//')
#merge the files
mergecap -w /mnt/md0/capture/DCN/"${TAG1}_to_${TAG2}".pcap ${FILES[@]}
sudo chmod +rw /mnt/md0/capture/DCN/"${TAG1}_to_${TAG2}".pcap 
#delete originals
sudo rm  ${FILES[@]}

Solution

FILES=$(command) is going to set a variable named FILES to a scalar that contains the output of command.

${FILES[0]} is going to be the contents of that scalar variable, in your case, a string containing 15 blank-delimited filenames, which will then be broken up into 15 fields.

It looks like you want FILES to be an array; for that, use FILES=( $(command) ) .

It's also good practice to surround shell variable accesses with double quotes - "${FILES[0]}" instead of ${FILES[0]} - so that the shell doesn't break the contents into fields if there's any whitespace in them.

Comments

[Abdul]

Shouldn't it be awk '{print $9}'?

[eric moon]

@Abdul yes I thought so, but it seems like in this system $8 is giving me the file names. I tested it manually to be sure

[Stéphane Chazelas]

tag1=$(basename "${FILES[0]}" .pcap. Remember that leaving a variable unquoted is the split+glob operator in shells.

[Gilles 'SO- stop being evil']

Note that FILES=($(command)) is only fine when the file names don't contain whitespace or \[?*.