Question

I am making a simple shell script which will minimize the time I spend in searching all directories under a parent directory and grep some things inside some files. Here’s my script.

#!/bin/sh
MainDir=/var/opt/database/1227-1239/

cd "$MainDir"

for dir in $(ls); do

grep -i "STAGE,te_start_seq Starting" "$dir"/his_file | tail -1 >> /home/xtee/sst-logs.out

if [ -f "$dir"/sysconfig.out];
then
    grep -A 1 "Drive Model" "$dir"/sysconfig.out | tail -1 >> /home/xtee/sst-logs.out
else
    grep -m 1 "Physical memory size" "$dir"/node0/setupsys.out | tail -1 >> /home/xtee/sst-logs.out
fi

done

The script is supposed to grep the string STAGE,te_start_seq Starting under the file his_file then dump it sst-logs.out which it does. My problem though is the part in the if statement. The script should check the current directory for sysconfig.out, grep drive model and dump it to sst-logs.out if it exists, otherwise, change directory to node0 then grep physical memory size from setupsys.out and dump it to sst-logs.out. My problem is, it seems the if then else statement seems not to work as it doesn`t dump any data at all but if i execute grep manually, i do have data.

What is wrong with my shell script? Is there any more efficient way in doing this?

Answer 1

First, when you say “change directory to node0 then grep” you’re not changing dirs here you’re just using a different path. Do you really want to change directories? Is “$dir/node0/” or is it outside of the directory “$dir”?

Second, does /var/opt/database/1227-1239/ have any files with spaces?
Can you show the output of ls?

I wouldn’t use ‘for dir in $(ls); do’

You’ll start to run into a lot of pitfalls when you attempt to parse ls

for dir in * ; do 
 if [[ -d "$dir" ]] ; then
  grep -i "STAGE,te_start_seq Starting" "$dir"/his_file | tail -1 >> /home/xtee/sst-logs.out
  if [ -f "$dir"/sysconfig.out]; then
   grep -A 1 "Drive Model" "$dir"/sysconfig.out | tail -1 >> /home/xtee/sst-logs.out
  else
   grep -m 1 "Physical memory size" "$dir"/node0/setupsys.out | tail -1 >> /home/xtee/sst-logs.out
  fi
 if
done

You can also use find -maxdepth if you got it, otherwise it turns into a .. -prune -o ..

My only guess is that $(ls) has some files with bad characters or spaces so when you manually process the files everything works because you’re escaping these characters?