My first Bash script : trouble with * 3355

On Wed, 13 Apr 2005 20:26:53 +0200, Vincent Schmid staggered into the Black Sun and said:

You can do this without a problem. bash expands glob patterns, though.

Escape the * . "echo*" will echo a single * to the screen. Or single-quote the *, like "echo '*' ". You've probably seen people escaping * before, as in

find . -name*stuff-* -print

...escaping the * here prevents the shell from expanding *stuff* to files in the current directory that match regexp .*stuff.* ; the *stuff* is pbutted directly to find and it finds all files in the current directory and all subdirectories that have "stuff" in their names.

The R=`lspath-to-place wc -l` that I used will be inefficient ifpath-to-place has a lot of files in it. Commands in `` are also less efficient than other ways to do things, but `` is easy to understand and very handy.

Nope. Rotating backups like this should be fairly easy.

# fragment of backup thingy BACK=-path-to-my-backups-somename cd $PATHWHEREMYSTUFFIS cp -a $DIRIWANTTOBACKUP $BACK`date +%F` # we should check $? and bail if cp returned an error. This is left as # an exercise. NUM=`ls -d $BACK????-??-?? wc -l` KILL=`ls -d $BACK????-??-?? sort -n head -n 1` rm -rf $KILL # kill the oldest one fi # end fragment

...I just rsync ~-Mailand ~-workon my laptop to my desktop every night. I don't want or need to keep 10 days worth of backups though.

If you want complicated, long scripts, look at the configure scripts that ship with source tarballs. Sometimes, you'll get 7000+ lines of 40 lines, bash. If it needs more than that or needs hashes or subroutines or lots of text manipulation, Perl." YMMV.

I am not a bash guru; I just know enough to get by. HTH anyway,

-- Matt GThere is no Darkness in Eternity-But only Light too dim for us to see Brainbench MVP for Linux Admin mail: TRAP + SPAN don't belong