Hi i need to create a bashcript that remembers how many times it has been executed

For example
sh myscipt
This is the 1 time
sh myscript
This is the 2 time

and so on... how i can implement this? I have thought to store the counter into a file or into a shell variable?? What do u want to suggest me and how i can implement this?
Thx a lot

Why not have the script open itself and write the number of times to the bottom of itself? Or make it find the line starting something like "RUN: " and append the number of times it's been executed there?

Or make a file ".myscript" (a hidden file) in the home directory that contains the number of runs. You could use the env variable idea, but then that will be reset at each boot.

I personally like the idea of the script editing itself. It sounds messy and like bad coding style, which I am all for in casual computing. Hooray for the IOCCC.

If you wanted to use an evironment variable, you could write it to a line of .bashrc or some other startup script so that the variable is restored each time the computer reboots. However, this might be even more hairy than the previous suggestions.

Thx a lot guys but your answers didnt help so much...... I want each time to remember the number of executes times... because i want to create each time a directory and put in there some files ....

sh myscript
creating folder 1
copying fles in the folder

sh myscript
creating folder 2
copying files in the folder

When i reboot the computer
sh myscript
creating folder 3
copying files in the folder

and so on,... is it clear?

hi there,
the "remember" feature does not exist.
what you can do is:
if you have a standard name for you directories - i.e. all of them are called fooXX, you can just increment your variable based in how many directories foo* exists.
regards
slackie1000

thx...and how i can do this?

hi there,
what have you tried so far? show me what you got and i give you the directions..
regards
slackie1000

This thread was interesting!

I tried out some ways to achieve this. I thought of using a named pipe and I tried it also. But FIFO dont keep data after reboot/logout.

So, decided to keep the count inside a hidden file called .counter . And my .bashrc looks like this.

[seran@seran seran]# cat .bashrc
# .bashrc

# User specific aliases and functions

alias rm='rm -i'
alias cp='cp -i'
alias mv='mv -i'

COUNTER=`cat .counter`
export COUNTER

# Source global definitions
if [ -f /etc/bashrc ]; then
. /etc/bashrc
fi

And the script which I used to make use of COUNTER is this,

[seran@seran seran]# cat prcount.sh
echo "Number of times...${COUNTER}"
COUNTER=`expr $COUNTER + 1`
echo $COUNTER > .counter

This does the work, but looks sloppy.

I was searching inside the /etc/rc.d/ scripts to find out something. I thought the different run level scripts can give some ideas for achiecing this. But I gave up after spending some hours.

Guys! Any more suggestions?