Shell Programming and Scripting

hello all, I have a script (Solaris v8 ksh) monitoring an inbound directory for reports. The script will then capture the report based on a set of circumstances. However I am unable to capture a report larger then 2-Gig in size due to program limitations. What I need to do is pause the monitor script wile it moves the selected large report, and then resume when the process completes. This is a snippet of what I've come up with, but it doesn't pause the script!

#!/bin/ksh -m -i
if [ "`head -1 $QMLARGEDIR/bigfile.lst`" != "" ]; then
for files in $(<$QMLARGEDIR/bigfile.lst); do
echo "Report: $files Exceeds the file size limit"
echo "Moving it to the: $QMLARGEDIR Directory"
mv $INBOUNDMAINDIR/$files $QMLARGEDIR/$files %%
wait $!
done

even better would be to do a specific process wait. I believe it would be done like this, but not sure:

wait %?$files

Any help and/or suggestions would be fantastic, and greatly appreciated. Thanks guys.

why don't you just make the next command dependent on the mv command?

Code:

#!/bin/ksh -m -i
if [ "`head -1 $QMLARGEDIR/bigfile.lst`" != "" ]; then
    for files in $(<$QMLARGEDIR/bigfile.lst); do
        echo "Report: $files Exceeds the file size limit"
        echo "Moving it to the: $QMLARGEDIR Directory"
        mv $INBOUNDMAINDIR/$files $QMLARGEDIR/$files && next_command
    done
fi

your code as modified here --- note the missing "wait $!" and "&& next_command" --- will by itself wait until the earlier big file is done moving prior to continuing with the loop ... no need to pause the script ...

Code:

#!/bin/ksh -m -i
if [ "`head -1 $QMLARGEDIR/bigfile.lst`" != "" ]; then
    for files in $(<$QMLARGEDIR/bigfile.lst); do
        echo "Report: $files Exceeds the file size limit"
        echo "Moving it to the: $QMLARGEDIR Directory"
        mv $INBOUNDMAINDIR/$files $QMLARGEDIR/$files
    done
fi

As the script stands it executes the move and immediately jumps to the next group of statements. This is merely a small addition piece to the larger script.

What's wrong with that? The move is finished before the next statement is executed.

The move takes about five + min to complete. Because the script doesn't pause, the remainder of the script will attempt to capture the same report that is being moved, as it has not been fully removed from the inbound monitor directory, hense a program crash.

Oh a correction, at the end of the move command I have tried a '&' not the '%%'. I think the '%%' designates a selection of the current background process yes?

& puts a command in the background. So just don't do that. Whether the move takes five minutes or five days, the script will wait for it to complete. Commands in a script are executed sequentially.