Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi,

At the moment, I have inserted an actual filename to conduct searches through it etc... Instead, I want the user to choose a filename and then do the searches against this file, instead of already having specified the file in the code. How would I do this? I tried doing the following, but it says cannot find file or directory, but the file does exist.

echo "enter file"
read file
echo "enter word to add"
read word
echo "$word" >> "$file"
------------------------

Thanks for your help.

That code to work fine for me. Try enabling the debug mode i.e. set -x to enable and set +x to disable.

Code:

set -x
echo "enter file"
read file
echo "enter word to add"
read word
echo "$word" >> "$file"
set +x

hi
first chk it out in debug mode.

otherwise use complete path with filename instead of only filename. use "pwd"

hope so it works.


regards,
swapneel

thanks, i just have another question. I have two files - 'menu' and 'addword'. The user has to run 'sh menu' and then a menu appears asking the user to enter a filename and to press 0 from the menu to add a word to the end of the text in the entered filename.

Now, i entered a filename at the beginning of the menu when it asked me to and this was stored in $file as you can see from the code, but when i choose to run addword by pressing menu option 0, i entered a word to add, but it would not add to $file. It says ambiguous redirect. It is as though the filename that i entered at the menu option has been forgotten. Can it not stay in memory for more than one file? thanks.

----------------------------
Menu
----------------------------
echo "enter filename of text"
read file
echo "0: Add word"
read entry
case $entry in
0) sh addword;;
esac
echo
done

--------------------------------
addword
--------------------------------
echo "Enter the new line to add:"
read newline
echo "$newline" >> $file

you are getting the file variable value in one shell script and using it in another shell script... this is not valid

You should either do export of file variable before calling addword script or pass file variable as a argument to addword script...

hi

u need to pass file name to new script.
see this thread

https://www.unix.com/shell-programming-and-scripting/26603-passing-values-shell-script.html