Teaching myself Linux. Hit a road block

dcj1978 · 08-05-2007, 01:08 AM

First off, this is my first post here. I've read through a few now and so far, I can tell i'm gonna learn a lot here.

As for my question, i'm teaching myself Linux. I've been running Ubuntu for a couple days now and I decided i'd dig into some tutorials to really figure out how things work.

The tutorial i'm going through now is to the point where it's explaining shell scripts and how they can be used. I've been able to edit and run the "today" function and did the ever popular "Hello World!" script and both went fine.

The next thing that was in line was, using a shell script to create a web page. I do a lot of web page work so..I thought this sounded really cool. I just can't seem to get it to work though. Here's my code for the script named 'make_page'...

Code:

#!/bin/bash

# make_page - A script to produce an HTML file

cat <<- _EOF_
    <HTML>
    <HEAD>
        <TITLE>
        My System Information
        </TITLE>
    </HEAD>

    <BODY>
    <H1>My System Information</H1>
    </BODY>
    </HTML>
_EOF_

I save that to my home directory, and then, this is what I put into the terminal..

myname@ubuntu:~$ make_page > make_page.html

I get this error..

bash: make_page: command not found

..but it does create a blank HTML file..with the correct name, in that directory.

I'd appreciate any help I can get so I can continue with this tutorial. Whew...long first post.

Thanks!

Nylex · 08-05-2007, 01:23 AM

There are "environment variables" in the shell, one of which is PATH, which is a list of directories to be searched when you type the name of an executable. You get the error message you're seeing because the shell can't find "make_page" in any of those directories. To run an executable that's located in a directory not in the PATH, you have to use the entire path. If the executable is in the current directory, you can prefix it with "./", which is shorthand for the absolute path to the current directory. So, use "./make_page > make_page.html".

Edit: oh and welcome to LQ

.

dcj1978 · 08-05-2007, 01:34 AM

Ah! Very cool. Looked that up and it gave a walkthrough on adding dir's to the list. Very handy.

Working like a charm now.

Oh, and thanks, good to be here! Already working out quite well for me. heh

GregLee · 08-05-2007, 01:38 AM

You didn't make the file "make_page" executable (from what you say): "chmod +x make_page". The part of your statement "> make_page.html" created the file "make_page.html". It's also possible that, as Nylex says, the current directory is not in the list of directories searched for commands (though it is in that list, ordinarily). You can check by looking at the output of "echo $PATH" to see if there is a "." there.

chrism01 · 08-06-2007, 01:35 AM

Actually, the current dir is normally NOT in the PATH for security reasons ie someone drops an evil ver of ls into your dir and you are 'owned'.
Originally this was just in root's acct, but it seemed like a good idea for everyone.

bigearsbilly · 08-06-2007, 05:33 AM

Shhh!
http://www.unix.org.ua/orelly/unix/upt/index.htm