bash hints – for loops

Today I had to process some files in a similar way in a bash shell. After trying using pipes, I reverted to for loops. First iterating for all files in a directory and extracting its contents (they were *.tar.bz2):

(...)/pcl-book/c23-spam/sa-pub-corpus> ls 
20030228_easy_ham_2.tar.bz2  20030228_hard_ham.tar.bz2  20030228_spam.tar.bz2 
20030228_easy_ham.tar.bz2    20030228_spam_2.tar.bz2
(...)/pcl-book/c23-spam/sa-pub-corpus> for f in *; do tar -xjf $f; done

Then, I discovered that the archives contained a file which I didn't wanted, so, I removed the files (the files were named “cmds”):

(...)/pcl-book/c23-spam/sa-pub-corpus> ls 
20030228_easy_ham_2.tar.bz2  20030228_hard_ham.tar.bz2  20030228_spam.tar.bz2  easy_ham_2/  spam/ 
20030228_easy_ham.tar.bz2    20030228_spam_2.tar.bz2    easy_ham/              hard_ham/    spam_2/
(...)/pcl-book/c23-spam/sa-pub-corpus> for f in `ls --ignore=2003*`; do `rm $f\cmds`; done