Shell Programming and Scripting

I'm a Linux newb, I've been running a Debian Linux server for about a year now, and I've written some simple scripts to automate various things, but I still don't know much, and I forget what I learn as fast as I figure it out... Anyway, that really isn't important, I just want you to know that you will probably need to keep things simple if you answer my question. I use ssh to access my server so it is all command line.

I want to write a script to automate backups of certain files on my server. What I've done is create at text file with the name I want to call the backup file, and the folder or file I want to back up seperated by a space, one backup file per line, as follows:

mysql_config /etc/mysql
apache2_config /etc/apache2

What I want to do is have the script read each line, and create a gzipped tarball of each file/folder with the name I have given. My problem is that, as I understand it, cat goes line by line, how do I extract the two different variables from each line? Everything else I think I can figure out, but that one has me stumped. I was thinking I could use awk or mawk, but how do I get awk to only parse one line incrementally?

Thanks in advance. I'm pretty sure this will be simple once I see the solution...

Code:

exec < inputfile
while read file dir ; do
       echo dir = $dir
       echo file = $file
done

Why couldn't you have your input file contain:

Code:

/etc/mysql/mysql_config
/etc/apache2/apache2_config

It seems it would be easier, since you could then just read the file line by line -- one line per backup.

EDIT: Disregard that. I misinterpreted your requirement.

I tried the following:

exec < backup_files
while read names files ; do
echo files = $files
echo names = $names
tar -czf $names.tgz $files
mv $names.tgz /var/backups/$names.tgz
done

All I got was a bad interpreter error.

#!/bin/sh

echo "File Name:"
read filename

line=`cat $filename`
for item in $line
do
echo "Generating tar file $item"
echo "Enter Tar file name:"
read tarfnm
tar cvf ${tarfnm}.tar ${item}
echo "Done"
done

Now I'm really confused, I can't even get a 'echo "hello world"' script to work. The script runs but nothing gets printed to the screen...

Code:

#!/bin/ksh

exec < inputfile
while read file dir ; do
echo dir = $dir
echo file = $file
done