Having problems with a shell script for manipulating and uploading images to my webserver

Question

I know this is dirty and definitely not the best way of doing this. I've hacked together a bunch of different scripts to try to make this work but I keep getting a "convert.sh: 24: Bad Substitution" error. Maybe someone can help me clean this up and make it work. Thanks.

#!/bin/bash

rm -v -R temp/
mkdir temp
mkdir temp/raw

DIR="/media/mdrive/dump/"

if [ -z "$DIR" ]; then
    echo >&2 "Syntax: $0 <directory>"
    exit 1
fi

if [ ! -d "$DIR" ]; then
    echo >&2 "\"$DIR\" is not a directory"
    exit 1
fi

cd "$DIR"

for file in *.jpg *.JPG; do
    first=${file::1}
    mkdir -p $first && mv $file $first/;
done

cp -v -R /media/mdrive/dump/* /media/mdrive/stagingForUpload/
cp -v -f -R /media/mdrive/dump/* /media/mdrive/original/
cp -v -R /media/mdrive/dump/* temp/raw/
rm -v -R /media/mdrive/dump/*

# Creates directories
mkdir temp/images
mkdir temp/medium
mkdir temp/large

# Copies ~/Desktop/raw into ~/Desktop/small, medium & large
cp -v -R temp/raw/* temp/images/
cp -v -R temp/raw/* temp/medium/
mv -v temp/raw/* temp/large/
rm -v -R temp/raw/

# Converts images into respective size and quality
find temp/images/* -maxdepth 2 -iname "*.jpg" -print0 | xargs -0 mogrify -resize 100x100">" -quality 80 -compress JPEG -monitor -strip
find temp/medium/* -maxdepth 2 -iname "*.jpg" -print0 | xargs -0 mogrify -resize 428x270"^" -quality 80 -compress JPEG -monitor -strip
find temp/medium/* -maxdepth 2 -iname "*.jpg" -print0 | xargs -0 mogrify -resize 428x270">" -quality 80 -compress JPEG -monitor -strip
find temp/large/* -maxdepth 2 -iname "*.jpg" -print0 | xargs -0 mogrify -resize 800x800">" -quality 85 -compress JPEG -monitor -strip -gravity SouthEast -draw 'text 10,10 "www.kmstools.com"'

#Batch Renames
find temp/medium -iname "*.jpg" -printf 'mv %p %p\n' | sed 's/\.jpg$/_MED\.jpg/' | while read l; do eval $l; done
find temp/large -iname "*.jpg" -printf 'mv %p %p\n' | sed 's/\.jpg$/_LRG\.jpg/' | while read l; do eval $l; done

# Consolidates images into image directory
mv temp/large temp/images
mv temp/medium temp/images

# Removes Thumbs.db
find temp/images/ -type f -iname Thumbs.db | while read FILE ; do rm "${FILE}" ; done

# Copies images/ to website_directory_structure
cp -v -R temp/images/* /media/mdrive/website_directory_structure/

# Uploades files to Old KMS Webserver
ncftpput -m -R -F -u <username> -p <password> <webserver>.com /public_html/images/ temp/images/

Answer 1

How about looking for the only substitution in the script? ;-) (Yes, it is in line 22!)

You either need to use /bin/bash or find some other means to extract the first letter of the word...