Hi,

I would like to begin running a backup script on my system to keep some of my critical files backed up. The backups involve tar`ing and bzip`ing about 300 MB worth of files, so it is somewhat resource consuming while running, meaning having it run on cron while the system is in use would become irritating when the system slows to a crawl for a few minutes when I'm in the middle of something.

So, I want this backup to run at system shutdown because I could care less if my system is slow to shut down (given that, if I'm shutting it down, that probably means I'm done using it!). Also, I would like the ability to enter 'y' or 'n' to tell the script if it is going to create a backup or just skip it.

So, two questions: How would I write a script to execute automatically on system shutdown in Gentoo, and how would I write such a script to include a prompt?

Thanks.

Something to the effect of
----------------------------------------------------
echo -n "Do you want the backup script to run: "
read Answer

if [ "$Answer" = "y" ]; then
tar cvjf backup.tar /whatever/directory/you/want
else
echo "Backup skipped"
fi
----------------------------------------------------

Now this is not complete or syntactfully correct, I don't have a linux box at work to write/test a script to be correct but this should give you the basic outline. The READ is what allows you to get input from a prompt. Also, this will fail if you don't enter a lowercase 'y', you could build in checks to help prevent that error. Also, anything that isn't a lowercase 'y' is a No which is another bad coding, but like a said this is a quick and dirty version.

You should have something like rc.0 script in /etc/rc.d or /etc/init.d ( I'm not really sure how it is named on gentoo ). This is the script executed on shutdown. You could put at the beginning of it, or whenever you like ( don't know if you have some database running which you would like to have closed uring backup. ) Just be careful taht necessary services are still running.

oops, I left that out. In gentoo, you'll need to stick that script in the local.stop file in /etc/conf.d directory.

If you then to rc-update -s and look at local, it should be active for the default runlevel

Hi
I think thats a wonderful question as a matter of fact....Sys Admins do require these kind of scripts....



regards
Manish