Shell Programming and Scripting

You're awesome thanks a lot!!!

The other advantage of this technique is that if the sftp fails on one of the transfers for any reason while in batchmode all processing of the batchfile stops at that point so there is much less danger of deleting a file that wasn't successfully sent .

Aia,
No. No. No!

The only three ways for the command:

Code:

cd $READDIR

to silently change directory to a user's home directory:And, since gkelly1117's code includes:

Code:

export READDIR=/home/foobaruser/TDE

four lines before using $READDIR, we know that none of the above apply. If, however, the invoking user does not have permission to search /home or /home/foobaruser, or one ore more components of /home/foobaruser/TDE does not exist; then the current working directory will not be changed and a diagnostic message will be printed.

If you want to know if and invocation of cd succeeded, the proper thing to do is to check its exit status.

_____________________________________________________________
gkelly1117,
I don't understand what you're trying to do with the following code:

Code:

cd $READDIR
if [ -a  $READDIR ]
   then
     echo " $CURRDATE files found to send in $READDIR!" >>$DAEMONLOG 2>&1
   else
     echo "no files found in $READDIR to send!" >>$DAEMONLOG 2>&1
     exit
fi

Most programmers would check to see if a directory exists before trying to cd to it, or would check the exit status of the cd command. Instead of that, you blindly cd , ignore the exit status, and then check to see if a file of any type exists with that name. And then, if a file exists with the name of the directory you tried to cd to, you decide that there are files to send (without checking to see if there are any files in that directory). Why do you log a message saying files were found when you haven't looked for any files yet???

Why not wait to log a message saying you found files to process until you actually determine that there is at least one file to process? If after searching through the directory you don't find any files to process, why not log a message saying no files were found before attempting to sftp zero files?

Every time you copy a file (locally with cp or remotely with sftp), you should check the exit status. Instead of doing that, you assume that the copy succeeded and blindly remove your oriiginal. And at the end, why copy a file and remove the originals? Why not just move the file to the new name you want it to have? (That way, you don't risk running out of space for the copy, you don't have to worry about losing the original file contents if the copy failed. And, you'll know that you still have the contents of your original file either with the old name or the new name!)

Shouldn't the removal of the list of files to be copied and the files that you tried to copy to the remote system be kept until you have determined that the sftp completed successfully?

I'm sorry, but yes, yes, and yes. You just explained my point, regardless of what you thought you read on my post.

You said that cd /home/foobaruser/TDE will change the current working directory to the user's home directory if it is unable to change the directory to /home/foobaruser/TDE. That will NOT happen! After running the command:

Code:

cd /home/foobaruser/TDE

the current working directory will either be the directory /home/foobaruser/TDE or the current working directory will be unchanged.

@No Don,
I did not

This is what I said:
Noticed that I only posted a small portion of the code to just bring attention to the possible harmful practice, tenting fate with rm *. I did not even do reference to the specific code, except for the $READDIR because it was there. I could had said cd $NOTHING_HERE and it would had done the job. That portion of the code was copied to help the OP know what I was talking about.

You described the specific condition I pointed out, in your point 1:
But any of the others, would nicely had created the same disaster.

With the code being discussed in this thread:

Code:

...
export READDIR=/home/foobaruser/TDE
#export TEMP=/opt/foobar/$ENV/tmp
export TDE_BACKUP=/home/foobaruser/TDE/backup

cd $READDIR
...

as I said before, there is absolutely no way that the cd command shown in red above is going to "silently change directory to your $HOME if it can not use $READDIR to change". I said there were three ways that a cd command could move you to $HOME AND NONE of them are possible with this code.

I fully agree that ignoring exit codes from cd, cp, sftp, and other utilities is a recipe for disaster; but there is no way the above code is ever going to silently change directory to $HOME.