Shell Programming and Scripting

Ah yes, never good at counting zeros. I agree, that's about 3Gb.

Sorry about that.



A change in content of /home could cause a spectacular failure, but as I'm not a software house, this is just some help to get started. Best to consider the 'interesting opportunity' for yourself to work out how you want to detect / handle this exception.

I'm not sure what happens at the end when the two data files that are pasted are different length. You would have to try and adjust the scripting suggestions. It might go a bit wild.



Take care,
Robin
Liverpool/Blackburn

Hi Robin,

I am still not convinced how this script to cause any failure or trouble. From what I understand the script is going to check the du for home...report the size of each sub-folders...dump to current file and previous file...make a comparision between these two files...find which folder has 30 GB more data from the time the script was last run...and report any alert for such folders. Not sure am I missing out here? Sorry

Thanks

Well, in /home on a test server I have, the du reports only a few lines:-

Code:

8     caroot
0     guest
0     lost+found

If I add an empty directory aaaaaaaa then capture the output from du -ks * to a file to use as my initial 'previous' file, then remove the directory aaaaaaaa again, running the script tell me that directory aaaaaaaa (which no longer exists, of course) has grown by 8, and caroot (which has not changed) has shrunk by 8. The others are unchanged, but it could get complicated if they had any contents to start with.


Try it out as a test (i.e. don't send any e-mail) It is just a report, after all.



Does that help to illustrate the risks? Of course, if you are sure that there will be no changes at the top level (e.g. new users) then go ahead.




Robin
Liverpool/Blackburn

Hi Robin,

The script is working the way I desire. However, the email alert that is being generated looks like below:

Total amount of data in is KB and exceeds the limit of kB!

Our original script had "Total amount of data in $dir is ${size}KB and exceeds the limit of $limit kB!" .....how can I get the name of the actual directory name (that exceeds the limit) and the size in the alert email?

Thanks

---------- Post updated 10-06-11 at 02:19 PM ---------- Previous update was 10-05-11 at 09:56 PM ----------

Hi Robin,

Can you help me with my last post for the alert email. Thanks.

Shailesh

Ah! Sorry.

The variable in the message should be $dir1 because that is what is being read back in from the work file. Of course, you could user $dir2 too, because they should always match, unless we have that problem where files/directories change in /home



Oops!

Apologies again,
Robin
Liverpool/Blackburn

Hi Robin,

Thanks for the reply. Can you let me know whether we can also report the size of the folder along with this script. I need to have the alert saying that folder ABC current size is xx KB/MB and earlier it was xx KB/MB. Also, I need to get down deeper like it can check for more sub-folders within the /home/ABC folder...can that be done?

Regards.

If you would have stated your requirements clearly to begin with, you would have saved yourself and Robin a lot of time.

The code you've been provided has a serious shortcoming which has been pointed out to you. That limitation, in conjunction with a requirment to monitor directories at all levels of a hierarchy, means that the serious shortcoming is almost certainly a dealbreaker.

Whereas monitoring the perhaps relatively static set of directories directly beneath /home may not trigger the flaw very often, monitoring directories at all levels is much, much more likely to yield errors.

And still, at this point, you haven't fully stated your requirements. For example, should the size calculated for a directory include the contents of all its subdirectories, or only the files in that directory? If the former, that means that any directory exceeding the growth limit will cause all components of its path to also exceed their limit, creating a lot of noise in the report. If the latter, the task is a bit more complicated.

Regards,
Alister