Question

i’m just starting out with bash & am trying to write a script to search specific files in a server remotely based on: (a)device name and (b) string. my goal is to get all output containing ‘string’ for the device specified. when i tried the script below just hangs. however, when i run the command directly on the server(“grep -i “router1” /var/log/router.log | grep -i “UPDOWN”), it works. any ideas?any ideas?

#!/bin/bash
#
read -p "Enter username: " user
read -p "Enter device name: " dev
read -p "Enter string: " str
while read /home/user1/syslogs
do 
 ssh "$user"@server1234 'grep -i "$dev" /var/log/"$syslogs" 2> /dev/null | grep -i "$str"'
done

Answer 1

You seem to be mis-using the read command. You don’t specify the file to read from as an argument; read always reads from standard input. It’s not clear what you want to do with the value you read from the file as a result, but you want something like this:

read -p "Enter username: " user
read -p "Enter device name: " dev
read -p "Enter string: " str

while read fileName; do
    # Also: I'm borrowing sputnick's solution to the nested quote problem.
    ssh $user@server1234 <<EOF
        grep -i "$dev" /var/log/$fileName 2>/dev/null | grep -i "$str"
EOF
done < /home/user1/syslogs