UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Working on a script to look in a directory for a certain file. If the file is not there, check the time. If the time is greater than 10:00, send me an email. If it's not, sleep for 15 minutes and then do this all over again.

I can get it to email me if the file's not there without the sleep portion. Once I add the sleep, it appears to be working (I run the script and it waits until 10:00 to bring the command prompt back), but it doesn't send an email.

What am I doing wrong?

Here's the snippet of code:

if [ ! -s $DATA_DIR/test2.das ]
then

now=`date +'%H%M'`
if test $now -gt 1000
then
/usr/bin/echo $MESG_DELAY | /usr/bin/mailx -s $MESG_DELAY here@there.com

else
sleep 900

fi

Script to send mail

Your problem lies here
/usr/bin/mailx -s $MESG_DELAY here@there.com

You could check the link.

Hmmm...there are other scripts running in cron jobs (which is where I want to put this, when it's working) that have that mailx line and are working as designed. In fact, this script works as designed until I put in the sleep.

I think the problem is, with my current code, I'm telling it to sleep, but then never do anything after the sleep. So it's coming back after x minutes and completing, but not really doing anything. I need something after the sleep to tell it to try again.

How can I "name" the nested test so that I can easily refer back to it again after the sleep? Rather than duplicating the code?

Code:

while true
do
    if [ ! -s ./test2.das ]
    then
        now=`date +'%H%M'`
        echo $now
        if test $now -gt 1000
        then
           /usr/bin/echo $MESG_DELAY | /usr/bin/mailx -s $MESG_DELAY               here@there.com
           exit
        else
           sleep 20
        fi
    else
# Put what you need to do if it DOES find the file here and add another exit or this will keep repeating!
fi
done

Next time add more detail (such as what you shell you are writting in).

KSH...thanks for this, I will play around with it a bit, after I put out some fires.