I am having difficulty writing a shell script that retains a variable. This is what I need to do.

I call a shell script via a cron job every 5 minutes. It checks how many incoming connections I have on a particular port and logs it to a web page. That portion is done. Here is my problem. In additon to those stats, I want to get an hourly total. In my mind, I need to retain that variable and keep a count of it each time the script runs. Then at the end of that hour, I want to divide that total of my previous variable(s) and divide by 12 (each time the script runs) to get a average. There are other things that need to happen so I need to continually call the script.

My problem is each time that script runs it resets my variable and I can not get a running total. I tried making a new variable each time it runs by creating a variable based on the current minute. I was receiving errors with that. Obviously I am doing something wrong here. Most of my scriupts are run once use once. So I am not certain how to proceed. I Can someone please give me a code example for a bash script or point me to a resource that will help. THANKS A LOT.

The only way is to use an external database, or save intermediate results to a file.

GRRR. I thought so. Thanks. Ill setup mysql.

mysql is overkill for that.

This is a simple sample. You'd want to have code to put a zero in the file after you run your hourly stats. And you'd want to replace the code to assign "count" with your numbers. And the filename becomes whatever you want to use to store the running total.

This adds the numbers as you go. You could keep all 12 by just using echo $count >> $filename ... and then you'd have the script part which creates the other average... but that is slightly different.

The file containing the variable did the trick. Thanks a lot for the suggestions ggiys. Both of you were a huge help. My script is running properly now. Thanks Now I can go to sleep