Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi folks,
Need your help.

I am writing a KSH script to read a few commands from a file & execute.
I am using the following code to read the file line by line & excute each command. When I am printing each line I see it is printing properly but while excuting, the particular "ps" command does not seem to accept the "grep" command piped to it.
It shows usage error.

while read cmd
do
echo "$cmd" >> $dumpfile
$cmd >> $dumpfile
done < commands.cmd

Sample Commands File content: [commands.cmd]
ps -ef | grep user1
ps -ef | grep user2

I face the same problem when I am pass say "ps -ef | grep user1" as an argument to a script & try to run the this argument from inside the script.

Any idea why this happening & how to resolve this. Please let me know.

Regards,
Tipsy

Add this near the top of your script (after the shebang (#!/bin/ksh or whatever)):

Code:

set -x

What is the output?

Code:

while read cmd
do
   echo "$cmd" >> $dumpfile
   eval "$cmd" >> $dumpfile
done < commands.cmd

This is the debug output I get after setting "set -x"

+ ps -ef | grep user1
usage: ps [ -aAdeflcjLPy ] [ -o format ] [ -t termlist ]
[ -u userlist ] [ -U userlist ] [ -G grouplist ]
[ -p proclist ] [ -g pgrplist ] [ -s sidlist ]
'format' is one or more of:
user ruser group rgroup uid ruid gid rgid pid ppid pgid sid taskid
pri opri pcpu pmem vsz rss osz nice class time etime stime
f s c lwp nlwp psr tty addr wchan fname comm args projid project

Regards,
Tipsy.

Hey thanks vgersh99. You are awesome !!!
The "eval $cmd" does work fine.

You made my day. Thanks.

-- Tipsy.

Another way to do the work :

Code:

sh -v command.cmd >> $dumpfile 2>&1

Jean-Pierre.