Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi there. I am attempting to write a script that will read through a flat file, get the server and directory that I want the size for, connect to the server, get the directory size, and send it to an output file. Here is what I have:

while read LINE
do
NAME=`echo $LINE | awk -F'~' '{print ($1)}'`
SERVER=`echo $LINE | awk -F'~' '{print ($2)}'`
DIRECTORY=`echo $LINE | awk -F'~' '{print ($3)}'`
DATABASE=`echo $LINE | awk -F'~' '{print ($4)}'`
SIZE=`/usr/bin/ssh target_account@remote_host du -s $DIRECTORY`
echo $NAME $DATABASE $SIZE >> $MDIR/bldtdout.txt
done < $MDIR/billdtad.txt

My input file(billdtad.txt) looks like:
{NAME}~{SERVER}~{DIRECTORY}~{DBNAME}

I have two rows of data in the input file. Only the first row is being processed.

I have another script that uses this same basic code and works fine. The only difference between the two is that the other script is getting directory sizes on the same server that it is running on, so line 9 looks like:
SIZE=`du -hs $DIRECTORY`

Because the scripts are otherwise the same, I am guessing that my problem has to do with the read loop and the ssh connection inside the loop.

How do I get it to read through the entire file and connect to the different servers?

Code:

while read LINE 
do
   NAME=`echo $LINE | awk -F'~' '{print ($1)}'` 
   SERVER=`echo $LINE | awk -F'~' '{print ($2)}'` 
   DIRECTORY=`echo $LINE | awk -F'~' '{print ($3)}'` 
   DATABASE=`echo $LINE | awk -F'~' '{print ($4)}'` 
   SIZE=`</dev/null /usr/bin/ssh target_account@$SERVER du -s $DIRECTORY`
   echo $NAME $DATABASE $SIZE >> $MDIR/bldtdout.txt
done < $MDIR/billdtad.txt

Jean-Pierre.

Code:

while IFS='~' && read NAME SERVER DIRECTORY DATABASE dummy
do
    SIZE=`/usr/bin/ssh target_account@$SERVER du -s $DIRECTORY`    
    echo "$NAME $DATABASE \c"
    echo "$SIZE" | tr -s '\n' ' ' 
done < $MDIR/billdtad.txt >  $MDIR/bldtdout.txt

It sounds like you are getting multiple lines back from ssh?

This fixes that problem and simplifies the code little bit...what does the ssh command give when you execute it from the command line?

.. ssh is fussy about being called in certain ways, like when stdin is not a tty.

Jean-Pierre - why /dev/null redirected?

just in the case which ssh requires input, to avoid $MDIR/billdtad.txt be read.

Jean-Pierre.

Thank you! I added </dev/null to my code and it works perfectly. I am going to look into shortening the code by using Jim's suggestions. Thank you both.