I am writing a shell script that can decompress archives in .tar.gz and .zip format. I have already made them into usable commands executable from the bash shell (script placed in /usr/local/bin folder). The last step I need to complete is to be able to damper or turn off messages from the utilities the scripts use. I do not want the commands I am using in the script (tar, gzip, zip) to output messages. How would i do this?

current script:
#!/bin/bash
if [ "$1" = "--help" ] ; then
echo " Usage: To decompress archives in the .zip or .tar.gz format

2 required argument:
Argument 1 = Name of archive without file extension
Argument 2 = File extension of archive. -t for tar.gz and -z for zip

Warnings:
1. Do not add the file extension to argument 1. The script does not
require the file extension to work.
2. you must always have the file extension before the keep/delete option.
You will confuse the script if you do otherwise

Examples:
delete and decompress a .tar.gz archive:
decompressor example-archive -td
delete and unzip a .zip archive:
decompressor example-archive -zd:
keep and decompress a .tar.gz archive:
decompressor example-archive -tk
keep and unzip a .zip archive:
decompressor example-archive -zk

--lapishater276"
exit 0
fi
if [ "$2" = "-td" ] ; then
echo "decompressing and deleting $1..."
gunzip $1.tar.gz
tar -xvf $1.tar
rm $1.tar
echo "$1 decompressed and deleted."
elif [ "$2" = "-zd" ] ; then
echo "unzipping and deleting $1..."
unzip $1.zip
rm $1.zip
echo "$1 unzipped and deleted."
elif [ "$2" = "-tk" ] ; then
echo "decompressing and saving $1..."
gunzip $1.tar.gz
tar -xvf $1.tar
gzip $1.tar
echo "$1 decompressed and saved"
elif [ "$2" = "-zk" ] ; then
echo "unzipping and saving $1..."
unzip $1.zip
echo "$1 unzipped and saved"
else
echo "do 'decompressor --help' to see how to use this command"
fi

You redirect stdout and/or stderr to /dev/null:(In that particular case it would make more sense to remove the "v" parameter, as that's what's causing tar to print the name of every file in the archive.)

To send both stdout and stderr to /dev/null:
However, this is a bad idea, especially since you are not checking the return value of these utilities. I recommend at least using an if statement to check if the functions fail or not.

FYI if you do not specify the -v (verbose) option tar will not display any file names etc. unzip has a quiet option -q that when invoked will not display file names too. However, you will still see error messages.

The redirect will prevent all messages from being displayed but then you will not see specific error messages if you enter the wrong file or archive type. As stated checking for return status would a good idea.

Also the -z option will untar gz files so you do not need two commands.

1 members found this post helpful.

How would i add an if statement to see whether or not the script failed?

You mean, how do you add an if statement to see if one of the commands used by you script, failed?

Just about every command in existence follows the convention of generating a non-zero exit code if the operation somehow fails. Different commands may return different values depending on the nature of the error, but it's fairly safe to assume that a non-zero value means something went wrong.

The exit code is stored in the $? variable, so a simple test would look something like this:Here I simply test for a non-zero value and print a simple error message before exiting the script with an exit code of 1.

Note: Every command returns an exit code, including the if command. If you need to run multiple tests on an exit code for a specific command to deal with different error conditions, you'll have to store the contents of $? in a different variable first. Otherwise, the first test will clear the contents of $?, and all subsequent tests will fail.

Some more ways to respond to errors:

1) Use the command as a parameter to the if statement:
2) Write an error function and use the or statement: