I want to copy a file from a directory using shell script
Suppose I save the directory and file name seperately as
dir=/home/user/directory/
file=file_1
to copy the file Im using this command in my script
cp $dir$file .
But I get this error
/bin/cp omitting directory '/home/user/directory'
I have tried all combination eg. omitted the trail backslah from variable dir, etc but nothings working. I cant understand what is wrong with this code. Pleas help
Maybe the command $dir$file is not getting unpacked in the shell (ie only the directory variable is getting unpacked, not the file variable)!!!!!
It looks like you are having problem with expansion in cp $dir$file . In order to prevent possible problems, it is better to protect your variable with braces and double quote the full path/file to make sure you don't get caught by spaces in either the filename or heaven forbid the user's dirname:
cp "${dir}${file}" .
This will prevent the possibility the second $ is missed. Also make sure you have read access to other users /home (if you are root or using sudo you should be fine)
If you see this, when you somehow assign an empty string to file somewhere. Search your script for file= and unset file.
You can also debug this by adding
echo ".${file}."
in the line before the cp command. I'm pretty sure it prints .., i.e. the variable is empty or doesn't exist.
Related
By accident I named my image file wrong so I wanted to delete it. So I typed the following in my linux console:
rm localapps\logo.jpg
But it didn't work.
Then I wrote
rm *.jpg
then it worked. Simple question. Why did the first not work , even I know that is the way to delete files in linux?
We would need the output of the commands you are running. You typically have no output when the command succeeds.
It is also important for you to notice that in linux, the / character is used to denote directories, and not \, which is actually typically the escape character.
In a terminal is also very important for you to notice in which directory are you working and what is the relative path to the file you want to refer to. You can find this out with the command pwd that stands for print working directory.
You would see something like
your-box:~ blurry$ pwd
/home/blurry
your-box:~ blurry$
This said, when you type
rm localapps\logo.jpg
since \ is a escape character, this is interpreted as
rm localappslogo.jpg
this means, it is looking for the file named localappslogo.jpg in the current directory (/home/blurry/localappslogo.jpg).
I assume that file does not exist, then, it will output something like:
rm: localappslogo.jpg: No such file or directory
when you type
rm *.jpg
this code removes any file ending in .jpg in the current directory. So notice that if you were trying to delete a file that was in the localapps folder, you should use instead
rm localapps/logo.jpg
But this is always assuming that the relative path to your image is localapps/logo.jpg.
You can also change directory then delete the file like this,
cd localapps
rm logo.jpg
I need to use a shell script to move all files in a directory into another directory. I manually did this without a problem and now scripting it is giving me an error on the mv command.
Inside the directory I want to move files out of are 2 directories, php and php.tmp. The error I get is cd: /path/to/working/directory/php: No such file or directory. I'm confused because it is there to begin with and listed when I ls the working directory.
The error I get is here:
ls $PWD #ensure the files are there
mv $PWD/* /company/home/directory
ls /company/home/directory #ensure the files are moved
When I use ls $PWD I see the directories I want to move but the error afterward says it doesn't exist. Then when I ssh to the machine this is running on I see the files were moved correctly.
If it matters the directory I am moving files from is owned by a different user but the shell is executing as root.
I don't understand why I would get this error so, any help would be great.
Add a / after the path to specify you want to move the file, not rename the directory.
You should try this:
mv $PWD/\* /home/user/directory/
Are your variables properly quoted? You could try :
ls "$PWD" #ensure the files are there
mv "$PWD"/* "/company/home/directory"
ls "/company/home/directory" #ensure the files are moved
If any of your file or directory names contains characters such as spaces or tabs, your "mv" command may not be seeing the argument list you think it is seeing.
Let's say I make a file .history.txt:
touch .history.txt
and I try to write to it:
cat > .history.txt
after having done that all I get is:
bash: .history.txt: is a directory
What I need is to be able to write some text to it like I would be able to any normal file. Any ideas what am I doing wrong?
A file doesn't need to already exist in order to redirect output to it (the shell will create the file if necessary). But Bash is telling you that .history.txt already exists and is a directory, so you can't write to it.
You either need to remove the existing directory rm -rf .history.txt or use a different file name. Then cat > .whatever.txt should work on its own.
I want to create a folder named by the user name in /tmp/vnc/, I can create that folder in command line with perl -e 'mkdir("$ENV{USER}")', but for the following code cannot work.
chdir ("/tmp/vnc") or die -1;
mkdir ("$ENV{USER}", 0777) or die -1;
If I use mkdir -p /tmp/vnc/$ENV{USER} in command line to make folder, nothing happens and no error reports.
It works for me.
Maybe the /tmp/vnc directory does not exist, and the chdir fails.
Or maybe the $USER environment variable is not defined, because you are running it from a init.d script, for example...
Or maybe you do not have write permissions in the /tmp/vnc directory. Have you tried executing mkdir /tmp/vnc/$USER from the shell?
Impossible to know more without details.
Please check special variable $! for text error message
Please check that variable $ENV{USER} doesn't contain extra quotes. I had similar problem in Windows OS for Activer Perl. My problem was in extra quotes
Perhaps something is resetting your environment when you are running the script? Can you print the contents of $ENV{USER} and make sure it contains what you think it should?
if $ENV{USR} is an absolute path (with the leading slash), then the chdir is useless since you are not using a relative path
I am working on a shell script and for some reason when I say
cp full_path/* full_path_directory/
I get an error. I have echoed out the command and when I run what it echos in an interactive shell it works. I can't figure out why it won't work in a shell script. I'm using full paths rather than absolute. I have tried to putting a slash at the end of the destination directory and then not putting a slash...what else could it be?
Error:
cp: /opt/local/apache2/htdocs/baseline/*: No such file or directory
So when I echo it out I get:
/opt/local/apache2/htdocs/baseline/* /opt/local/apache2/htdocs/test/
It means what it says. There are no files in /opt/local/apache2/htdocs/baseline/ directory, or you don't have permissions to read the directory. What does ls show you?