Shell Programming and Scripting

Hey all,

I want to automate tarring a directory then using ftp to transfer the files over.

I was able to put the commands together but what I'm noticing is that only the very first file is being tarred and then transferred.

Code:

tar cvpf new.backup source

Above is the command I'm using which works fine on its own but it looks like right after the command is executed in my script the ftp command is also executed immediately after which results in bad data.

How am I supposed to get around this? Is there a way to wait for a previous command to finish?
I was reading up on subshells; putting the command in ( ) but that did not work
I also tried using it with wait.

I'm going to try and execute the command in another script and see if my shell will wait for it to finish but I'm hoping someone out there can give me some insight?

Thanks a bunch,
Erin

---------- Post updated at 07:37 PM ---------- Previous update was at 07:25 PM ----------

I got it to work this way to control the execution sequence

Code:

tar cvpf  new.backup source && echo "this is done now" >> log

My shell script will now not move forward until the first command argument has succeeded then it will process the echo statement

Is there any alternatives to this? I would love to hear them
Does anyone see any issues with the way I'm doing this?

It really depends on how your FTP script works. If those commands were in the same script just run line-by-line, it'd wait for tar to finish. You're running two separate scripts and connecting them somehow...

Could you show how you do the whole procedure, not just the tar end?

This works
But if I remove the && operand the ftp portion executes immediately (I think) after the tar and when I view the tar on the ftp host, it only records the first file

that very same file that gets sent over to the ftp host is fine when I look at it on the original server

Is there another way to do this?

Code:

tar cvpf ${APP_BACKUP} ${APP_SOURCE} && echo "this is done now $!" >> {$LOG}

if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
	echo "${APP_BACKUP} Has been created" >> ${LOG}
fi

ping ${FTP_HOST} -c 2 > /dev/null 2>&1 

if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then

${CMD_FTP} -n ${FTP_HOST} <<BATCH
quote user ${FTP_USER}
quote pass ${FTP_PASS}
binary
mkdir ${BACKUP_DIR}
cd ${BACKUP_DIR}
put ${APP_BACKUP}
bye
BATCH
exit 0

else
	echo "Could not ping ${FTP_HOST}"
	exit 1
fi

It won't execute immediately, it will wait for tar.

If you had a stray & (single) after tar, that could have put tar into the background and caused those symptoms.

Thanks Corona688