intro to UNIX - making a sort-of recycle bin (for fun) Post: 302310754

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Top Forums Shell Programming and Scripting intro to UNIX - making a sort-of recycle bin (for fun) Post 302310754 by jzacsh on Monday 27th of April 2009 12:18:37 AM

04-27-2009

Registered User

intro to UNIX - making a sort-of recycle bin (for fun)

Hello, I'm only taking Intro to UNIX in school right now, so please bear with me. My problem is with a sort-of recycle-bin rig I've created for fun. I'm using Ubuntu 9.04, I am the admin. (only user, actually) of this computer. I'm using this script in ~/.bashrc

Code:

# if files exist, remove contents (of purge directory)
ls -lA ~/purge;
echo "^ this was a test, to be sure the following command should work"

purgeTest= "ls -lA ~/purge" # setting a variable to check contents of ~/purge
if [ $purgeTest -ne "total 0" ]; then
rm -r ~/purge/* 
fi

side note: I would think that checking if a directory (line 5) has contents is unnecessary, except when I just had rm -r ~/purge/* written, I'd get rm: cannot remove `/home/jzacsh/purge/*': No such file or directory BUT only when the purge directory was empty.

Here is the output I'm seeing on login:

Code:

total 0
^ this was a test, to be sure the following command should work
bash: ls -lA ~/purge: No such file or directory
bash: [: -ne: unary operator expected
jzacsh@dell8300:~$

bottom line, questions:
what am i doing wrong to get the "no such file or directory" error, in line 3 just above? (am I using variables incorrectly?)

is -ne operator only for mathematic comparisons - line 4 of error? if so, what should I use?

-thanks in advance for any suggestions!

jzacsh

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LEARN ABOUT DEBIAN

backup-manager-purge

BACKUP-MANAGER-PURGE(8) 				       backup-manager-purge					   BACKUP-MANAGER-PURGE(8)

NAME

       backup-manager-purge - backup-manager's wrapper for outdating files

SYNOPSIS

       backup-manager-purge [TTL] <options>

DESCRIPTION

       backup-manager-purge is the only authorized entity that can say if an archive should be purged or not. Any tasks used by backup-manager may
       have to know if an archive is deprecated (eg: the purging phase of an upload method). This tool is here to fulfill that need.

       Given a time to live (TTL) and a list of archives, backup-manager-purge will return another list of archives, corresponding to the ones
       that are outdated by the TTL.

REQUIRED ARGS

       --ttl=time-to-live
	   Specify the time to live (in days) for the archives. Any archive that is older than ttl days will be outdated.

OPTIONAL ARGS

       --files-from=file
	   A file containing a list of archives to parse, one archive per line.  If this option is not used, STDIN will be used for catching the
	   files to parse.

RETURN

       backup-manager-purge will return the list of outdated files on STDOUT, one file per line.

ERROR CODES

       If an error occurs, it will print the error message on stderr and will exit with an error code greater than 0.

       Here are the possible error codes:

       bad command line (wrong arguments) : 10
       internal error (should be reported as a bug) : 20

SEE ALSO

       backup-manager(8) backup-manager-upload(8)

AUTHORS

       Concept and design by Alexis Sukrieh and Jan Metzger.

perl v5.14.2							    2012-05-09						   BACKUP-MANAGER-PURGE(8)