UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Oddly enough, I was able to get this to work without any problems

Code:

#!/usr/bin/ksh

find dir1/dir2 -type f -name "FILE.*" -newer dir1/dir2/afterme.txt -exec cp {} dir1/dir2/dir3 \;

The result of the above code is: /bin/bash

No I'm not in school. This is a live environment and I'm putting scripts in place to move files around. These exact scripts works on other servers but not this one.

It works if I type it manually. But put it in a script and no go.

Oh and I'm running these commands are root, if that makes a difference.

This is hard for all of us:
what does

Code:

echo $PATH

show?

Are you running the script in cron?

The result from "echo $PATH" is: /usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/X11R6/bin:/root/bin

I'm testing it first using the ./scriptname command. Once it works there, then I'll put it in cron.

This sure looks weird.

To sum up what we know so far:

OS: RedHat
Shell: bash
User: root
no chrooted environment, no special non-printing characters.

First observation: the paths in the script are not absolute paths. This might lead to no directories/files being found when the script is executed in a wrong current path. Change these paths to absolute paths to make the script more robust.

Here is another take at problem determination: modify your script by switching on printing of the interpreted lines:

Code:

#!/bin/bash

set -xv      # <--- makes every line being printed to stdout after parsing

fRootDir="/some/path"   # set an absolute starting path

find $fRootDir/dir1/dir2 -type f -name "FILE.*" -newer $fRootDir/dir1/dir2/afterme.txt -exec cp {} $fRootDir/dir1/dir2/dir3 \;

exit 0

Now start the script this way:

Code:

root@server # ./myscript.sh 2> myscript.log

and post the contents of the file myscript.log here. I would really be interested in what the problem is here and what the final solution will be.

I hope this helps.

bakunin