I'm not sure if this is the right place for this thread, but here it is.

I do a database backup through the shell and write the dump to a file, but the file names end up looking like db1.sql?, db2.sql?, db3.sql. :'( When I include the proper files names in a cron job for tar (doing a site backup), the tar doesn't complete because it can't find those files.

Why are there question marks at the ends of the file names?

How can I get my script to not generate or fix the question marks?

code inside my sh file...
mysqldump -uuser_name 4 -ppassword --opt db1 > /home/user/logs/db1.sql
mysqldump -uuser_name 4 -ppassword --opt db2 > /home/user/logs/db2.sql
mysqldump -uuser_name 4 -ppassword --opt db3 > /home/user/logs/db3.sql

The cron job executes a php script that executes that shell script and then executes the tar.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks. :-D

mts

How did you create the shell file? Was it on an MS box?
There should be a space between -u and username value. What is the '4' doing there?

Yes, I created it on Windows. I actually copied the script from somewhere on the Internet. It works great with just one file. The 4 was leftover from my user name... I forgot to get rid of that part, too. I changed the script to have a space between the user name and password flags and values. Do these things have to do with the question marks?

MS uses a different line-ending sequence (\r\n) to Unix/Linux (\n). This causes issues.
You can use the (Unix) util dos2unix to convert the file.

Here's the doc for mysqldump.
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/mysqldump.html

Note that usually there is a space between the flag and the value eg -u username, but -p is an exception, there should be no space, thus: -ppasswd
See the link I gave you.

HTH
PS Please add your distro to your profile so we can see it, and post the ver of MySQL as well.

Thanks for the quick response. :-) I added the dos2unix program to my script and it seems to be working the way I expect. Thanks. :-D I have dos2unix in the script in case I change the sh file on my Windows box.

I changed the mysqldump stuff like you mentioned and was listed in the manual. I think it was the \r\n stuff that was appending ? to all of the sql files. Adding that program call seemed to work just fine.

mysql 5.0.51a is the version installed on the server.

Thanks again for the help!

MTS

My recommendation, edit Linux files on Linux, MS files on MS.


Saves on the ftp/scp as well.