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.”
A reader writes in to report that Accuweather has changed their Web page layout and the shell script from Wicked Cool Shell Scripts that returns the weather forecast (script #63, weather.sh), is broken.
If you find yourself working on the command line and need to whip out a quick statistical analysis or two, you’ll be glad to know that Wicked Cool Shell Scripts fan Josh Kotecha has sent in a very nice little shell script that does just that using the scriptbc script included in the book.
Another hiccup in a script included in Wicked Cool Shell Scripts, one that’s a subtle problem because it sometimes occurs because of a user-set LS_OPTIONS flag. Script #37, bestcompress, has the following sequence:
smallest="$(ls -l "$name" $Zout $gzout $bzout | \
awk '{print $5"="NR}' | sort -n | cut -d= -f2 | head -1)"
A reader of my new book Wicked Cool Shell Scripts pointed out that the capability of testing a file permission with find using the ‘+’ notation is GNU-specific.
A friend writes:
I’m finding that some number of people are hosting my Janet Jackson
“movie” by simply linking it in from their sites, meaning *I* get to
pay for the bandwidth. Is there some way to prevent this?
I’ve been discussing the key tasks that a Mac OS X user has to run to ensure that their system stays healthy and in tip-top shape, and one set that we’ve all agreed upon are the daily, weekly and monthly cron jobs. You can figure out when they’re run with a simple grep command.
