Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi Shell Scripting Experts,

I have a shell script running daily on a remote machine through ssh. To avoid the trouble of restarting the script when ssh disconnects, I use screen (a unix tool) and run the script within a screen session.

What this script does is to ask the user to input y or n daily and does some file appending based on the input. The following is the script

Code:

echo -n "DO YOU WANT TO APPEND FILE(y/n)? "
read qq

if [ $qq = "y" ]  
then
  echo "appending..."

else
  echo "quitting..." 
fi

However, one strange problem is that occasionally an unwanted character is put before a user's input. The following the full screen output by running sh -x myscript.sh. Notice that the user input a single character y but \020y was the one taken by the session. This problem does not occur always. I don't know whether it has to with the screen tool or something else.

Code:

+ echo -n 'DO YOU WANT TO APPEND FILE(y/n)? ' 
DO YOU WANT TO APPEND PREDS(y/n)? + read qq 
y 
+ '[' $'\020y' = y ']' 
+ echo quitting... 
quitting...

Any suggestions is highly appreciated.

thanks

Jeff

Looks like you are picking up a stray control character, probably due to the user.

Code:

if [ $qq == *y ]

Should match ok to either

Hi steadyonabix,

Thanks for your reply. You probably mean
if [[ $qq == *y ]]

It works!

thanks

Jeff