Question

I am running this command in a script

while [ 1 ]
do

    if [ -e $LOG ]
    then

            grep -A 5 -B 5 -f $PATTERNS $LOG  >> $FOREMAIL
            break
    fi

done

$LOG file is scp’ed from another machine. So as soon as it appears in the current directory, while loop detects it and does the grep. The problem is, the $FOREMAIL file turns up to be empty. But if I run this grep outside of the script as a standalone command with same files and params, I can see that it generates an output.

I am baffled as to why this command is generating no o/p in the script?

Answer 1

Here’s what I ended up doing:

scp $LOGFILE

then

scp $SCPDONE # empty file

And modified the if clause like this:

while [ 1 ]
do

    if [ -e $SCPDONE ]
    then

        grep -A 5 -B 5 -f $PATTERNS $LOG  >> $FOREMAIL
        break
    fi

done