Exclude file when upload directories

Question

I have written a simple shell script which uses ncftpput to recursively upload all directories in a local directory to a remote directory. My shell script, upload.sh is placed in this local directory and I would like to exclude it from the upload. Is there any way to do this?

ncftpput -R -v -u myUsername -p myPassword myAddress /remoteDir /localDir/*

I have tried doing it like this:

for i in `ls /localDir | grep -v upload.sh`; do
  ncftpput -R -v -u myUsername -p myPassword myAddress /remoteDir /localDir/$i
done

But directories with spaces will be considered two directories. E.g. "My Directory" will be considered:

1. /localDir/My
2. /localDir/Directory

Answer 1

Which is why you should never parse the output of ls. Especially if you can do the same thing with a simple wildcard.

#!/usr/bin/env bash

for i in /localDir/*; do
    [[ "$i" = */upload.sh ]] && continue
    ncftpput -R -v -u myUsername -p myPassword myAddress /remoteDir "$i"
done

Answer 2

You could use find to upload all other elements separately:

find /localDir -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 ! -name "upload.sh" -exec ncftpput -R -v -u myUsername -p myPassword myAddress /remoteDir {} \;

Skip the -exec and everything after it to just print the matching files and folders, for testing..

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You could also look into redefining IFS in bash, or the equivalent in your shell, but that still will fail with file names containing e.g. newlines.

Of course, the simplest solution would be to not mix the uploader script with the data to be uploaded...