Shell Programming and Scripting

You might want to undo the extra >$TMP, it's pointless. see above.

Keep the extra quotes though.

---------- Post updated at 03:16 PM ---------- Previous update was at 03:14 PM ----------

The difference between $fname and "$fname" is that the former will split into several arguments if $fname happens to have a space in it, while "$fname" will remain as one argument with a space in it. Splitting would be bad, as it might try to handle "/path/dir with space/file" as three files, "/path/dir", "with", and "space/file", and complain that it can't find any of them.

He's put it in quotes like "$fname", then added another layer of quotes like "\"$fname\"" to make sure it gets quoted on the remote machine too -- one layer of quotes gets stripped off of whatever you feed into ssh.

Dont worry about truncating the file, corona688 is right the > on the SSH line will truncate the file anyway.

I was thinking of ssh failing and the file remaining with previous data, but that can't happen.

Oh yes I didn't I just tested it and it worked just the same like you said Corona!

I just don't understand how he got the same thing with under 15 lines of code! I mean I understand that he created all the scripts for the company and the man's a wizard with regular expressions and scripting, but still. I understand your way, kind of!

He had I think 3 loops and used hostname and hosts, redirected my truncated directory sync. Forgot why he told me to make sure and use hostname as well as hosts files! Don't know! I'll ask and updated it here, just for FYI if it means something fot the script!

Thanks and now I gotta go get yelled at for getting help with this. He won't but I'm just very much out of my element with programming and scripting.

P.S. Do you guys think that it would be good for me to pickup some stuff about like C, C++, Pearl, Python, etc! I know that a lot but we'll see!

After all this struggling I'm just happy to have something that a) works, b) works well, c) is readable. If I knew then what I know now about your system I could've shrunk it a bit.

Some of the 'bloat' is error-checking though, and probably should be kept. ...I'm not sure where to begin. That's a lot.

Haha, and yes it is! But I want to get good at scripting quickly and efficiently! Asap!

Thanks a million, and I'll try to work with the bloat and see what kind of things I get!

Hey Corona688,

Just a couple of more questions. I'm trying to better understand these scripts. Some of the things you used:

Is there any other way of doing this input, or is this the only way that the loop will take the file!?

Code:

done < /home/izivanov/iz3

What is this redirection and what does the whole thing >&2 mean?

Code:

echo "local hash is ${hash}" >&2

And also what did you do with this part, I don't understand it!

# Skip errors

Code:

[ "$?" -eq 0 ] || continue

Thanks again for taking time to look at this!