Question

I am about as new to bash scripts as it gets, so probably quite the stupid question, but here it goes.
The idea is as follows: save basename of a file in a log–> move file–> use log to move back to original location.

basename $filename >> /directory/log
mv $filename /directory

So far so good, but I am quite confused as to how to use that log file to get file back. Is basename even the right thing to use? Idea I had was using grep to find filename in the log, but how do I go about getting that output at the end of mv ?

mv $filename ???

Am I on the right track? Screwing up something very basic?

Answer 1

Lets take the file httpd.conf as an example, it’s location is in directory /etc/httpd/conf/

$ ls /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf
/etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf

The command basename strips the path of the file and just returns the filename (and extension).

$ basename /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf
httpd.conf

So when you do:

basename $filename >> /directory/log

You are creating a log file that contains only file names, you will not be able to use /directory/log to move the file back to it’s original location because you stripped that information with the basename command.

You would want to do something like this:

echo $filename >> /directory/log
mv $filename /directory

So that now /directory is the new location of the file and /directory/log contains the original location of the file.