Shell Programming and Scripting

You can prevent list.ini from being listed in itself :

Code:

cd dustbin
ls | grep -v list.ini >list.ini
exec 3<list.ini
while read -u3 a
do rm -i $a
done
exec 3<&-
ls | grep -vf - list.ini >removed.txt
cp -p FileLocations.txt FileLocations.tmp
grep -vf removed.txt FileLocations.tmp >FileLocations.txt
rm removed.txt FileLocations.tmp list.ini

You can also just generate that file somewhere else so it will not be listed in that directory :

Code:

cd dustbin
ls >/tmp/list.ini
exec 3</tmp/list.ini
while read -u3 a
do rm -i $a
done
exec 3<&-
ls | grep -vf - /tmp/list.ini >removed.txt
cp -p FileLocations.txt FileLocations.tmp
grep -vf removed.txt FileLocations.tmp >FileLocations.txt
rm removed.txt FileLocations.tmp /tmp/list.ini

Thanks, I just editted where the dustbin.ini thing was saved to be in root instead of dustbin and it also worked

Now got this working perfectly, thanks a bunch!

in fact you have 2 choices :
1) prevent list.ini to be listed in itself
2) put list.ini somewhere else so it doesn't appear in the dustbin list
(see my previous post that i meanwhile have updated)

Another problem i've realsied is that if I created two files with similiar names such as:

hello
hellothere

if I restored "hello" then "hellothere" also gets removed from file locations, i realise it is probbably to do with inserting a $ somewhere to make it so that what is check is hello only without any proceeding characters.

Thanks in advance.

You should replace

Code:

ls | grep -vf - /tmp/list.ini >removed.txt

by this

Code:

ls | grep -vf - /tmp/list.ini | sed 's/.*/^&$/' >removed.txt

So this will also match beginning and end of line.

The thing you have to care of is the PATH since the matching must be exact.
(a same filename can be present in 2 differents path)

So i would advise you to work with absolute path name instead of relative (unless you are certain that the filenames in dustbin are going to be uniq by design or by the way they are generated so that they can be used as a key to retrieve the original location)

how would you manage the case :

Code:

/etc/file1 
/opt/file1
/usr/file1

have been removed...


(is there only 1 corresponding file1 in your dustbin directory ? even if those files have different content to eachother ? )
Or are the dustbin filenames generated so that they are uniq ?

I have made it so all file names are unique, so for instance if there's a file in the trashcan called file then I can not send another file called file there, without removing the first instance.


I tried that code out and got the error

sed: -e expression #1, char 8: unterminated 's' command

Please post exactly what you did try (there is no "-e" option in the current version of my previous post) make sure you didn't forgot the last separator (here, a slash) in the substitution command s/.../.../