[SOLVED] How to re-direct an error in script

shivaa · 10-26-2012, 02:17 AM

I have a script, something like this:

Code:

#!/bin/bash
filelist="/tmp/fileslist"
month=$(date +%m)
....
....
monthslist="01 02 03 04 05 06... 12"
for mymonth in $monthlist
do

ls -la $HOME/logfile.$mymonth* | awk -F" " '{print $9}' > $filelist

    for file in `cat $filelist`
      do
      mv $file /path/to/directory
      echo "Movement done for $file"  
      done
done

Now suppose a file don't exist for some month pattern, let's say logfile.07 doesn't exist, then script is displaying an error of "File logfile.07: No such file or dir.." on my screen. I just want to redirect such error, so it diplay only movement done echo message, not the errors. How can I redirect such error while i am already redirecting output of ls -la... command.

druuna · 10-26-2012, 02:22 AM

Is this what you are looking for:

Code:

ls -la $HOME/logfile.$mymonth* 2>/dev/null | awk -F" " '{print $9}' > $/tmp/fileslist

The above redirects to /dev/null, you can also redirect to a file.

shivaa · 10-26-2012, 06:52 AM

Great Druuna! It worked!!
Cheers!!

druuna · 10-26-2012, 07:23 AM

You're welcome

BTW: Can you put up the [SOLVED] tag.
first post -> Thread Tools -> Mark this thread as solved

David the H. · 10-28-2012, 05:17 PM

I have some comments on the above script:

1) It is not recommended to parse ls for data. If you need to extract the metadata of a file to test against, use stat.

2) Do not Read Lines With For! You should always use a while+read loop when reading lines of text input.

3) $(..) is highly recommended over `..`.

But actually, you seem to be going to a lot of roundabout trouble just to move a few files. Saving the output of ls -l to a file, then using awk to parse out the filenames again, and finally a for loop to move them one at a time. Seriously?

Is there any reason you can't simply do this?

Code:

echo 'Now moving the following files:'
printf '%s\n' $HOME/logfile.*

mv -t /path/to/directory $HOME/logfile.*

You can usually match the filenames you want with the proper globbing patterns. And the nice thing is you won't get any error messages unless there are no files that match at all (and even that can be controlled with the nullglob and failglob shell options).

If you need to be more specific and only match files with actual month extensions, you can use bash's extended globbing:

Code:

shopt -s extglob
mv -t /path/to/directory $HOME/logfile.@(0[1-9]|1[0-2])

Finally, if this is some kind of logfile maintenance script, have you looked into using logrotate?

shivaa · 10-29-2012, 01:13 AM

David, thanks for sharing such valuable info.
I am beginner in shell scripting, thus using simple commands, but knowledge is always limitless and your Wiki helped me a lot! Thanks agian.

David the H. · 10-30-2012, 09:14 AM

Glad to help out, and I hope you didn't think I'm being too hard on you. It's natural for beginners to use "spaghetti logic" in their scripts, and I've been guilty of it myself. But I tend to be a bit blunt in my criticisms.

Just keep working at it, listen to advice, and follow the links I gave. That whole site is a treasure trove of advice. I particularly recommend working through their BashGuide.

One thing that particularly helps when posting here is to focus on explaining your final goal, as opposed to just the immediate problem at hand. There are often better ways to accomplish what you want.