Shell Programming and Scripting

I have a very large database and once in awhile the database auto loading scripts that update the database for the daily updates fails and I have to go in and manually fix it but when that happens I usually have to start from scratch on sundays I have access to a weekly database rebuild. Then I have to apply each day thereafter to complete the process.

I have the weekly taken care of in a script that downloads the weekly update, unzips it, and uses some .sql scripts to load the information into the database. But I have 6 other scripts that have to be run one at a time for each of the days that may follow the weekly rebuild. What I am wanting to do is combine all 7 scripts into a single file say manual_rebuild.sh and then call that script with something like this:

./manual_rebuild.sh wed

The script would pick up that "wed" variable and it would download the weekly update unpack, load, delete the weekly .zip file then do monday, tuesday, and wednesday the same way. But I dont know how to define a variable like that from outside the script. If anyone has any clues please fill me in. Possibly a code example? Thank you...

To explicitly set a variable that will last for the scope of the script in sh, bash or ksh, do

Code:

WEEKDAY=wed ./manual_rebuild.sh

or to get a command line argument into a variable do this at start of script

Code:

#!/bin/sh
WEEKDAY=$1
...

Excellent, thank you very much the second one is what I was looking for! Just out of curiosity is it possible to have the script promt for the days to run like

Would you like to rebuild from last weeks major update? [yes/no]:

Would you like to add monday's update to the database? [yes/no]:

and it would carry out that set of instructions if you choose yes and if you choose no it would end the script.

That may be a little beyond the scope of a shell script but I am new at all this so the fact that I have written a script to do anything is amazing in itself. These scripts are my first attempts at any shell scripting. Thank again for the help...

Decided to do a little research on my own to try and figure this out I found a few things and this is what I have so far.

Code:

#!/bin/bash

echo -n "Would you like to rebuild DB from latest weekly?:"
read weekly
echo ""
echo You said $weekly
if [ $weekly = yes ] ; then
echo "This works!";

I get a small error about "unexpected end of file" but I think I am on the right track so far. I need figure out how I would do an ELSE. and then I can just put all my scripts in to one and use multiple sets of the above code, modified to work of course. Thanks for the assistance...