Hello everyone!

I am working on a small script that reads the /etc/passwd file and displays certain fields of a specified user's entry. The output of the file should go to both the display AND to a file.

I have the script working but am wondering if there's a more elegant way to accomplish it.

I first created the script so that it ran successfully on the screen. No problems here. Then I tried making it a function and calling the function while piping it to tee to send it to both screen and file. This is where the issues begin. I keep getting error messages on the grep command I run in the script looking for the given user in /etc/passwd. The user is provided as an argument when the script is called at the command line.

I removed the function portions and tried running

exec | tee /pathname/filename

at the end of my script and it runs on the display and the proper filename is created but the output is not sent to the file. It shows on the display correctly but nothing is in the file.

I have Googled everything I can think of. I've tried re-writing the function again but keep getting the grep error.

The resolution I've found for now is to pipe each line of the script to tee /pathname/filename individually (with an -a after the initial pipe to tee).

But there has to be a little more elegant way to accomplish this.

Any advice/suggestions?

Thanks!

Try this:
If it still doesn't work, you should check if your script writes its output to stderr or /dev/tty -- if so, fix it

Above should help with output issue, but your grep issue will only be solved if you actually show us some code ... otherwise we have no idea why you are getting errors.

1 members found this post helpful.

show us your "code".
[code]script or code output here[/code]

Thank you.

1 members found this post helpful.

OK this is a slimmed down version of what my program should do. It should collect fields 1 and 7 from the /etc/passwd file and then look for a specific user (grep $1).

It works well displaying on screen but the tee portion doesn't work completely because it only creates the file but it's not filled with the output. In my full file I had to put the | tee portion at the end of each line to make it work properly but am wondering if/hoping there is a more elegant way to do all of this in a single line.

Thanks!


CODE:

#!/bin/bash

argument=$1
DATE=$(date +"%m%d%y%k%M")

echo "TPS REPORT LISTING"
echo

awk -F':' '{print $1", " $7}' /etc/passwd | grep $1
echo

echo "END REPORT LISTING"


exec | tee -a ~/scripts/tps-list-$1-$DATE.rpt

OUTPUT:
Running the script like this: sh tps-gen.sh chris I get this on the display:

TPS REPORT LISTING

chris, /bin/bash

END REPORT LISTING


and doing an ls to the directory where the file needs to be created I can see the filename but an ls -l shows it with a size of 0:

ls
testFunction.sh tps-gen.sh tps-list-chris-0725161728.rpt

ls -l
total 8
-rwxrwxrwx 1 chris chris 220 lip 25 17:28 tps-gen.sh
-rw-rw-r-- 1 chris chris 0 lip 25 17:28 tps-list-chris-0725161728.rpt

Could you please edit your post and add [code] and [/code] tags?

So my question back would be, except for a couple of simple echo statements, awk does all the work (and grep is not needed) so you really could have done all this in an awk script.

So my suggestion would be to either make it an awk script, or simply use a bash while loop and read the file and make the output as required.
Assuming you stay in bash, the trick would be to group together (clue!) all the lines that create output so you can then place the tee redirection only once

1 members found this post helpful.

Hmmm, interesting. I will research awk more and see what I can learn. Thanks for the hint.