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My first shell script

Hi

I wrote my first shell script yesterday. It seems to work well, but I thought I'd post it up in case someone could suggest "It would work better if you..." :)

I wanted my teamspeak server to always be running on my PC.

I've put this short script in my ~/.bash_profile file to check if the server is already running, and if it is not, to start it.

I find it useful because I sometimes reboot linux, and often log into linux remotely. If the server was started without checking if it was already running, I would get various issues.

This is my first attempt at shell scripting, it seems to work well, but I'd appreciate any comments!

Code:

cat ~/Documents/downloads/teamspeak/tss2_rc2/tsserver2.pid

if test $? -eq 1

then

 cd ~/Documents/downloads/teamspeak/tss2_rc2

 ./server_linux -PID=tsserver2.pid

 echo tsserver2.pid not found, tsserver started!

 else

 echo tsserver.pid found. tsserver is assumed to be running.

fi

cd

Obviously, replace ~/Documents/downloads... with the path to your own teamspeak install directory.

One thing that I'd like to do to improve it is in the case of tsserver.pid not existing,
cat ~/Documents/downloads/teamspeak/tss2_rc2/tsserver2.pid
outputs
cat: /home/toby/Documents/downloads/teamspeak/tss2_rc2/tsserver2.pid: No such file or directory
It would be nice if this was silent. I've tried adding "> /dev/null" to no avail. Any suggestions? Something like "echo off"?

Something like this should work too:

Code:

#!/bin/bash

                                                                                

cd ~/Documents/downloads/teamspeak/tss2_rc2

                                                                                

if [ -f tsserver2.pid ]; then



    ./server_linux -PID=tsserver2.pid

    echo "tsserver2.pid not found, tsserver started!"



else



    echo "tsserver.pid found. tsserver is assumed to be running."



fi

Toby goes and looks up:
if [ -f filename]; then

Oh, yes, that's much tidier! And there was me trying to work out how to get "cat" to supress error messages. (Strangely, I could find details on the web of cat -s and cat -q switches, but these weren't working at all.)

The if/else is the wrong way around in your suggestion though. Also, I'm not putting #!/bin/bash at the beginning because this snippet is just pasted onto the end of my already existing ~/.bash_profile.

So, the (final?) polished up version would be:

Code:

# == Teamspeak autostarter script =====

if [ -f ~/Documents/downloads/teamspeak/tss2_rc2/tsserver2.pid ]; then

        echo "tsserver.pid found. Teamspeak is assumed to be running."

else

        cd ~/Documents/downloads/teamspeak/tss2_rc2

        ./server_linux -PID=tsserver2.pid

        cd

fi

# == End of Teamspeak script ==========

Thanks for the tips :)

by the way if you really want to supress the error message, you redirect standard error

Code:

cat nonexistant-file 2> /dev/null

or get rid of any output completely:

Code:

cat nonexistant-file 1>/dev/null 2>&1

check out the bash programming intro in http://www.tldp.org