find does not go through all files in folder structure

Question

I want to convert a massive bunch of wmf files (120860!) to svg in many subfolders (27 subfolder with many sub-subfolders each). I have this bash script that does

for i in `find -iname "*.wmf"`; do
  uniconvertor ${i} ${i%.wmf}.svg
done

but it never converts everything, it always stops somewhere in the middle. Some subfolders get converted, some not, some only partially. Even if I start the shell script in all 27 first-level subfolders, only part of the files get converted.

What could be the problem?

Answer 1

If you don't have line breaks in the names of your files or folders you should use a while instead of a for loop:

find -iname "*.wmf" | while read file; do
    uniconvertor "$file" "${i%.wmf}.svg" 
done

This avoids problems with spaces in names and with too much arguments when expanding the ...

Answer 2

You must surround your find ... command with $( ) to substitute the output, thusly:

for i in $( find . -type f -iname '*.wmv` ) ; do ...

However, you're causing Bash to produce (and store internally) a list of 120,860 filenames before you process the first one. Also (you haven't described the format of the filenames), this technique mishandles filenames with Spaces in them, e.g. A Big File.wmf.

Read man find, especially, about --print0, read man xargs, especially about -0, read man bash and wrap your command in a script that runs uniconverter on each of its arguments, and use something like:

find . -type f -iname '*.wmv' -print0 | xargs -0 thescript 

Be sure to read man bash and be very aware of any Spaces in your filenames.

@steeldriver: TQ for pointing out my error. Reading man bash shows:

 Enclosing characters in double quotes preserves the  literal  value  of
       all  characters  within the quotes, with the exception of $, `, \, and,
       when history expansion is enabled, !.  The characters $  and  `  retain
       their  special meaning within double quotes.  The backslash retains its
       special meaning only when followed by one of the following  characters:
       $,  `,  ", \, or <newline>.  A double quote may be quoted within double
       quotes by preceding it with a backslash.

So I overworried about Shell expansion.