Shell Programming and Scripting

test.ksh
===================
#!/usr/bin/ksh

APPLICATION=hr_app
APPLICATION_UPPER=`echo $APPLICATION | tr [a-z] [A-Z]`

echo $APPLICATION_UPPER > /tmp/test.txt
echo $APPLICATION >> /tmp/test.txt
which tr >> /tmp/test.txt
===================
When I run this from the shell:
/home/natter> more /tmp/test.txt
HR_APP
hr_app
/usr/bin/tr

But when I run this from cron:

/home/natter> more /tmp/test.txt
hr_app
hr_app
/usr/bin/tr

Why isn't the tr command working when using cron?

Thanks in advance for any help.

Are you redirecting STDERR and STDOUT to a log file for that cron job? Is there anything in there that might give you a hint? What OS is this?

Solaris 2.8

STDERR and STDOUT don't show anything..

I just tried this on another unix box, and it worked fine. (2.8 box)..

Any clues on what to look for? I just can't figure this out.

A command like:
echo abc*
might simply echo "abc*". Or the shell might find some filenames that match abc*, and it that case, it would echo the list of matching filenames.

Same deal with
echo [a-z]
the echo command may literally see "[a-z]". But if we have some one character lower case filenames in the current directory, it's no go. This is what is happening to you. Add three more lines to your script:
pwd >>/tmp/test.txt
echo [a-z] [A-Z] >> /tmp/test.txt
echo "[a-z]" "[A-Z]" >> /tmp/test.txt
and everything should become clear.

After you understand what was happening with your approach, try this:

typeset -u APPLICATION_UPPER
APPLICATION=hr_app
APPLICATION_UPPER=$APPLICATION
echo $APPLICATION_UPPER

ksh can upshift letters all by itself. No need for tr.

Perderabo,

I added those lines and it became clear to me.

I looked in the home dir for this user, and someone had created a file named: i

I understand the problem, I just dont' understand why the echo command isn't being piped to the tr command. Why is tr looking in the home directory when it is being invoked from a | command?

Thank you very much for your help. I will use the typeset command. This was many hours of frustration.

tr doesn't look in the home directory, but ksh will look in the current directory. When it did, it saw that file named i. So it replaced [a-z] with i and then it ran:
echo hr_app | tr i [A-Z]

Ok, so without the "[a-z]", tr was looking at the filesystem. I added the "[a-z]" and it worked fine. Then I changed everything to typeset -u.

Thanks again for the help. After looking at the man page for tr, the examples always use the "".