A reader writes:
I have your Wicked Cool book and love it. I am new at scripting and it is helping a ton. Question. I need a script to use the timestamp feature (ingenious by the way) of Script #83 but “get” the files from a remote server like Script #82. Do you have one modified in such a way?
It’s not uncommon for me to receive email from people asking for information that’s covered in one or more of my books, and this morning I received a message asking about good places to go online to learn more about shell script programming. My answer, of course, is to buy a copy of my best selling book Wicked Cool Shell Scripts, but if that’s not in your budget, there’s another possibility to explore.
A reader writes:
Every *nix implementation is different. But I’m seeing some some shared behavior between HPUX and Solaris with script #52 Killing Processes by Name. The problem is that the script is trying to kill the “tty” name, instead of the pid.
Wish I understood the following line better so I could make it grab the right columns. :-\
pids=$(ps cu -U $user | awk “/ $1$/ { print \$2 }”)
A reader writes:
First, thanks for writing Wicked Cool Shell Scripts. I’ve found them quite useful and I’ve learned many things from those scripts.
I just have a question and I was wondering if you could point me in the right direction.I’m trying to write a shell script that will pull the top-level directories out of a list of file paths, example:
list of files:
/usr/local/test
/usr/bin/test
/opt/Tivoli/dat
/opt/lib/test
/tmp/files/test
/tmp/local/testOutput after script:
/usr
/opt
/tmp
A reader writes in with the following note:
I’ve just picked up your book Wicked Cool Shell Scripts, and there are a lot of nifty things in
it. I too have accumulated a lot of things generally in small scripts
or more frequently in bourne/bash functions. I was particularly tickled
to see a lot of very similar code, one such that jumped out at me was
your gmk function in one script (I called mine kmg).Would you be interested in some constructive criticism?
In script #52 Killing Processes by Name, I think that instead of:
awk “/ $1$/{ print \$2 }”
you might consider using
awk “$NF==”$1″ { print \$2 }”That way, you’re not dependent on whitespace.
I have received a number of queries from people in the Unix/Linux community asking for the details of ownership and copyright for the scripts included in my best-selling Wicked Cool Shell Scripts. When I first started programming and distributing my works online (in the early 1980’s) no-one really worried about any of that and if the original author’s name stayed intact, we’d think that was a wonderful thing.
A reader writes:
“My question concerns backup.sh (script #56 in the book Wicked Cool Shell Scripts). I am a little confused how to set
up my directory list file INITIALLY to use for the backup script to work. Do
you have to do a -f (full backup) first, then I’m free to incrementally backup
as desired? Even then I’m only interested in backing some key directories not
my whole home space….”
A reader writes:
” Hi, I’m a very beginner at shell scripting and unix/linux. I have your book (Wicked Cool Shell Scripts) and it is really great. So far I’ve done two or three, Inpath is the one i use most. I’m going make a user for an ftp account so my friends can upload/download songs and other files. I decided to use your adduser script for the job but when i run the script i get an erorr like – /etc/passwd : permission denied. How do i give the script permission to write to /etc/passwd? Sorry if this is an obvious question but i couldn’t find an answer. I used chmod 755 and ran it as root. By the way, i really like the site and book cover, i wish all linux/programming manuals had really cool covers.”
