Shell Programming and Scripting

This is probably another thread, but what's the best way to do config
files. At the moment, I just use...

cat config_file|grep var_name|cut -d'=' -f2

... which is fine for what I've been doing, but I'm not sure what to
do when there are a variable number of entries and I want it go through
them like a list.

Course, the config file itself could be a script but I prefer to keep
the configs seperate from the functions. Not really sure how to do
this. It's a problem sometimes, though I can usually hack up some kind
of work-around for my ignorance.

If you plan to deploy that alarm into a mission critical process daylight saving time and in general adjustments to the system clock may be problematic for your script.

Yep, please start a new thread for new questions.

Great to know! Thanks.

---------- Post updated at 05:26 PM ---------- Previous update was at 04:58 PM ----------

done, sir.

In my opinion, your simple script is too complex.

Why not directly use the date-$time check as the loop condition? This way, $trig is not needed. Also, it may be more useful to have this script return the exit status of $command.

For your consideration:

Code:

#!/bin/sh

time="$1"
command="$2"

while [ "$(date +%H:%M)" != "$time" ]; do
	sleep 5
done
$command

Also, for portability, I made some minor modifications that may not be of any interest to you.

Since there's nothing bash-specific about this little script, I changed /bin/bash to /bin/sh. Should you ever need to run it on a system that does not have bash, it will still work.

A system without bash may have a date command that does not support the %R format. Since that's equivalent to the standard %H:%M, I used that instead.

Regards,
Alister

That's excellent. I'm always happy to see better ways of doing it. I just somehow had it in my head that it would be an if condition before I started, so it never occured to me to put the condition in the loop itself.

Whats ABSG got to do with this thread?