Shell Programming and Scripting

There are these ksh files and config files that are written and updated on a daily basis.

All I want to do is write a script that finds both these types of files and archive them on a daily basis, to help in restoring in times of system outages and so on. Particulary I'm interested in .ksh , .sql files and .ini files (config)

Please help with a correct procedure to locate these files in a directory and all it's sub-directories, all at the same time and archive them suitably using "tar".

if it's only one type of a file i see the solution as

find dirname -name *.ksh | xargs tar -rf tarfilename

i'm not sure how i can do it for all the file types simultaneoulsy, if at all that's a sensible idea.

any help is appreciated.

TIA,
sirisha

find . -name "*.sql" -o -name "*.ksh" -o -name "*.ini"

use '-o' to create an OR and then pipe to tar like you had above.

Thank you so much Dogday! just didn't strike me at the moment... !

But there's a minor correction.. your expression won't work unless the combined saerch pattern is enclosed within parantheses... otherwise the output would only contain the names of files with extension *.ini..

the actual expression is:

find . \( -name "*.ksh" -o -name "*.sql" -o -name "*.ini" \) ...

or else we get only files ending in .ini as the output.

Cheers,
Sirisha

Well perhaps your shell makes the difference. It works fine for me but I think the parenthesis appears more proper.

More help pls!!!

Infact, the expression worked fine, but what puzzles me now is the following tar

This is my shell script...

Archive=`(date +%Y%m%d)`
if [ -d searchdir ]
then
find searchdir -type f \( -name \*\.ksh -o -name \*\.sql -o -name \*\.ini \) | xargs tar -rf $Archive.tar
else
echo "searchdir is not a dir"
fi

The objective is to search for these file types on a daily basis and archive them into a tar file named with the corresponding date.

Any clues of where I'm mistaken?!

Regards
Sirisha

sorry.. i didn't explain my problem up there..

the error is " 20060224.tar: No such file or directory exists"

If i change the option of tar to -cf then the tar will be created but it is either empty (the searchdir has non-zero files of the desired extensions) or is non extractable, or even sometimes says "tar: Missing filenames"

if at all if the tar is created, i use tar -xvf 20060224.tar and see nothing!!

Getting back to the basics now..

I think i'm even wrong with my search pattern.. the expression doesnt just search for the required file types but includes all files in the directory along with the desired ones.

Can anyone Please suggest an answer?!

Despo for help,
TIA again!!