revised 25 April 2008 by Henry M. Walker
revised 24 January 2009 by Henry M. Walker last revised 8 May 2009 by Henry M. Walker
| CSC 161 | Grinnell College | Spring, 2009 |
| Imperative Problem Solving and Data Structures | ||
In this laboratory you will gain experience writing Bash scripts.
Basic knowledge of Bash shell commands.
This laboratory exercise was written by Marge Coahran, with editing by Henry M. Walker for consistency in formatting for CSC 161.
Index
A bash script is a file containing bash commands. To make the file executable, we must first take the following two steps. First, the script file should contain the following code as its very first line.
#!/bin/bashThis specifies which program (bash) should be used to interpret the commands in the script. Next, the file permissions for the script should be set such that is it executable. Recall that this is typically done as follows.
chmod 755 scriptnameThe script can then be run like any other executable file:
./scriptnameActually, we can also run a script as follows (even without making the script executable), but this is less frequently done.
bash scriptnamePlease take a few minutes to review the bash commands, and the information on file permissions, that you learned in the GNU/Linux labs we did earlier in the semester.
Write a bash script called greeting that prints a greeting to the user -- perhaps "Good morning" or something similar. Remember to insert the proper incantation on the first line of the script, and to set the file permissions to allow execution.
Note that commands in the script file do not need to end with semi-colons. (They are bash commands, not C statements.)
Now modify your script greeting so that it
For example, your output might look similar to the following:
Good morning, mcoahran.
Date is Sun Apr 20 12:22:47 CDT 2008
Users on Leah:
mcoahran :0 2008-04-20 11:45
mcoahran pts/0 2008-04-20 11:45 (:0.0)
mcoahran pts/1 2008-04-20 11:49 (:0.0)
Be sure to add comments to your script! Comments in bash scrpts begin with #, except on the very first line.
Variables can be created and initialized as shown below. Note that there should NOT be a space between the variable name and the assignment operator. (If the variable name has a space after it, bash will recognize it as a token, but since the variable does not yet exist, bash will assume the token is command name. It will then complain about not finding such a command.)
varname=12To access the value in a variable, prepend a $ to the variable name. For example,
echo Value in varname is $varname.Note that variables in a bash script are by default interpreted as text. To get bash to interpret a value as a number, in order to do arithmetic operations including arithmetic comparisons, you must wrap the expression in double-parentheses. For example, you might say:
if [ hour < 7 ]; thenThe arithmetic comparison operators are the same in bash as in C:
== != < <= > >= && ||Bash's other arithmetic operators are also reminiscent of C, with the addition of an operator for exponentiation (**).
+ - ++ -- * / % **The syntax for an if-statement follows. As you would probably expect, the elif and else clauses are optional, and the conditions and commands should be replaced with meaningful expressions. Note that the spaces that separate the square brackets from the conditions ARE required.
if [ condition ]; then
command(s)
elif [ condition ]; then
command(s)
else
command(s)
fi
Modify your script greeting to present a different greeting based on the time of day. For example, your greeting could be "good morning", "good afternoon", "good evening", or "YOU SHOULD BE SLEEPING!" based on the current hour. Note that the following command can be used to return the (24-hour) hour of the current time:
date +%k while test
do
command(s)
done
Write a script called countdown that prints output similar to the following:
10
9
8
7
6
5
4
3
2
1
GO!
Don't forget that bash uses the same arithmetic operators as C, but arithmetic expressions need to be wrapped in double-parentheses.
The command "read varname" will read a value from stdin and assign it to a variable called varname. If the variable does not yet exist, it will be created.
Note that the option "-n" can be used with echo to cause it to not output a newline character. (This is nice when printing user prompts, so the user can enter a reponse on the same line as the prompt).
| variable | stores... |
| $# | number of arguments given |
| $* | list of all arguments given |
| $1 | the first argument |
| $2 | the second argument |
| etc |
For example, you might say:
if [ $# == 3 ]Note that, unlike in C, the script name itself is NOT counted or included in the list of arguments given.
Modify countdown such that it prompts user for a starting value, and counts down from there.
Write a script called countdown2 that accepts the initial value as a command-line argument. For example, the command and its output might look like the following.
$ ./countdown2 12
12
11
10
9
8
7
6
5
4
3
2
1
GO!
Modify the script countdown2 to check for correct usage. The script should print a usage message and exit if it does not receive exactly one argument. An example session might look like this:
$ ./countdown2
Usage: countdown2 initial-value
exit returnvalue for varname in value1 value2 ...
do
command(s)
done
The variable varname will take on each value in the list of values in turn, with one iteration of the loop occuring for each value.
For example, consider the following script. Predict what it will do, and then copy it and run it to confirm your prediction.
#!/bin/bash
for var in 1 2 3 4 5
do
echo $var chimpanzee...
done
echo DONE!
Recall that your bash script is run by the very same bash that responds to your commands in the terminal window. Thus, all functionality available in the terminal window is also available to your script.
For example, we could write a for-loop that uses filename expansion (globbing) to print a list of all files in the current directory as follows:
for file in *
do
echo $file
done
Write a script that uses this idea to print output similar to the following:
Files in this directory that match *~ :
bash-scripts.html~
chimpanzee~
countdown~
countdown2~
hello~
TODO~
There are many operators that can be used for testing conditions that involve files: whether they exist, what kind of file they are, etc. Here are a few. Note that you could also place the NOT operator (!) before any of these tests to test whether the stated condition is false.
| condition | checks whether... |
| -f file | file exists and is a regular file |
| -d dir | dir exists and is a directory |
| -x dir | file exists and is executable |
For example, you might write:
clist=classlist.txt
if [ -f $clist ]; then
echo File $clist exists.
else
echo File $clist does not exist.
fi
For this exercise I wanted to give you some real-world examples of useful bash scripts. Therefore, you will write a couple of scripts that I actually use in my teaching to automate clerical tasks. To begin, please copy this (ficitious) classlist to your directory, and note that it contains a list of usernames.
Write a script called addnames that is to be called as follows, where classlist is the name of the classlist file, and username is a particular student's username.
./addnames classlist usernameThe script should
Hint: Use a for-loop to process each line in the file. To create a list of lines in the file, remember that you can use any bash construct inside a script that you can use in the terminal window. How would you list the lines of the file in the terminal window? Similarly, how would you append a particular item to the end of an existing file from the terminal window?
If you have not been doing so all along, you should now add some comments to your script and thoroughly test it!
Write a script called submit-dirs that is to be called as follows.
./submit-dirs classlistThe script should:
Write a script called trash that takes a single argument, which should be the name of an existing file. The script should move the given file, if it exists, to a directory named trash that is located within your home directory. If the trash directory does not exist, the script should create it. If the given file does not exist, an appropriate error message should be printed.
Hint: There are several "environment" variables that automaticaly exist within a bash script. These include the following. You may want to explore what values these hold by echoing them to stdout.
Once your trash script is working well, modify it so that it accepts a list of files and moves all of them to the trash. The script should print an error message for each file that does not exist, and it should print a usage message if no file names are given.
When testing your script, try invoking it with a command like the following:
./trash *.oIf you would like to, you could begin a directory of bash scripts you would like to use regularly (such as trash). You can then add the name of that directory to your $PATH by following the instructions given below. Doing so will allow the scripts therein to be available to you regardless of which directory you are currently working in.
To add a directory to your path, look for a file named .bash_profile in your home directory. It is a bash script that is run automatically when you log in. It should contain a line that defines the variable PATH. Note that the value assigned to this variable is a list of directories, delimited by colons. You can add your new script directory to your path by adding it to the end of this list. (That will cause bash to check your scripts directory after checking the others when search for programs to run.)
After modifying your .bash_profile, you should also run ./bash_profile with the following command to update the contents of your current path variable.
source ~/.bash_profile
This document is available on the World Wide Web as
http://www.walker.cs.grinnell.edu/courses/161.sp09/labs/lab-bash-scripts.shtml
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created 20 April 2008 by Marge Coahran revised 25 April 2008 by Henry M. Walker revised 24 January 2009 by Henry M. Walker last revised 8 May 2009 by Henry M. Walker |
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| For more information, please contact Henry M. Walker at walker@cs.grinnell.edu. |