Looping in shellcommands

[Christopher Browne]

I've got some situations where I need to run a command on each
file/directory in a list.

It's not quite clear how to accomplish that.

What I have done is thus:

shellcommands:
  chvatal::
    # clean up SN news spool
    "/bin/ls /var/spool/sn | /usr/bin/xargs -n 1 /usr/sbin/snexpire -5d"

What I'd _like_ to do is to set up a variable to contain all the
directory names under /var/spool/sn, and invoke the snexpire script on
each one.  Perhaps like:

control:
  chvatal::
    sndirs= ("exec /bin/ls /var/spool/sn")

shellcommands:
  chvatal::
    "/usr/sbin/snexpire -5d $(sndirs)"

although there's something not quite right there, as it doesn't _look_
like that would be much of an "iterator."

In shell script, it would be something like:

for dir in `ls /var/spool/sn`; do
  /usr/sbin/snexpire -5d $dir
done

Am I trying to be overly clever?  To be sure, what I've got up top with
the "xargs" does _work_.  But it seems likely there's a better "cfengine
idiom" for it.
--
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