I have a shell script and I want the session text to be saved automatically every time the script runs, so I included the command "script -a output.txt" at the beginning of my script. However, the script stops running after this line of code, which only displays a "bash-3.2$" on the screen and won't go on. Any ideas?
Thanks in advance!
The problem is script starts a separate sub-shell than the one that is running the actual script, to club them together. Use the -c flag in script
-c, --command command
Run the command rather than an interactive shell. This makes
it easy for a script to capture the output of a program that
behaves differently when its stdout is not a tty.
Just do,
script -c 'bash yourScript.sh' -a output.txt
Related
I am trying to run a series of tests on a remote Linux server to which I am connecting via ssh.
I don't want to have to stay logged in the ssh session during the runs -> nohup(?)
I don't want to have to keep checking if one run is done -> for loop(?)
Because of licensing issues, I can only run a single testing process at a time -> sequential
I want to keep working while the test set is being processed -> background
Here's what I tried:
#!/usr/bin/env bash
# Assembling a list of commands to be executed sequentially
TESTRUNS="";
for i in `ls ../testSet/*`;
do
MSG="running test problem ${i##*/}";
RUN="mySequentialCommand $i > results/${i##*/} 2> /dev/null;";
TESTRUNS=$TESTRUNS"echo $MSG; $RUN";
done
#run commands with nohup to be able to log out of ssh session
nohup eval $TESTRUNS &
But it looks like nohup doesn't fare too well with eval.
Any thoughts?
nohup is needed if you want your scripts to run even after the shell is closed. so yes.
and the & is not necessary in RUN since you execute the command with &.
Now your script builds the command in the for loop, but doesn't execute it. It means you'll have only the last file running. If you want to run all of the files, you need to execute the nohup command as part of your loop. BUT - you can't run the commands with & because this will run commands in the background and return to the script, which will execute the next item in the loop. Eventually this would run all files in parallel.
Move the nohup eval $TESTRUNS inside the for loop, but again, you can't run it with &. What you need to do is run the script itself with nohup, and the script will loop through all files one at a time, in the background, even after the shell is closed.
You could take a look at screen, an alternative for nohup with additional features. I will replace your testscript with while [ 1 ]; do printf "."; sleep 5; done for testing the screen solution.
The commands screen -ls are optional, just showing what is going on.
prompt> screen -ls
No Sockets found in /var/run/uscreens/S-notroot.
prompt> screen
prompt> screen -ls
prompt> while [ 1 ]; do printf "."; sleep 5; done
# You don't get a prompt. Use "CTRL-a d" to detach from your current screen
prompt> screen -ls
# do some work
# connect to screen with batch running
prompt> screen -r
# Press ^C to terminate the batch (script printing dots)
prompt> screen -ls
prompt> exit
prompt> screen -ls
Google for screenrc to see how you can customize the interface.
You can change your script into something like
#!/usr/bin/env bash
# Assembling a list of commands to be executed sequentially
for i in ../testSet/*; do
do
echo "Running test problem ${i##*/}"
mySequentialCommand $i > results/${i##*/} 2> /dev/null
done
Above script can be started with nohup scriptname & when you do not use screen or simple scriptname inside the screen.
Ive got a script that takes a quite a long time to run, as it has to handle many thousands of files. I want to make this script as fool proof as possible. To this end, I want to check if the user ran the script using nohup and '&'. E.x.
me#myHost:/home/me/bin $ nohup doAlotOfStuff.sh &. I want to make 100% sure the script was run with nohup and '&', because its a very painful recovery process if the script dies in the middle for whatever reason.
How can I check those two key paramaters inside the script itself? and if they are missing, how can I stop the script before it gets any farther, and complain to the user that they ran the script wrong? Better yet, is there way I can force the script to run in nohup &?
Edit: the server enviornment is AIX 7.1
The ps utility can get the process state. The process state code will contain the character + when running in foreground. Absence of + means code is running in background.
However, it will be hard to tell whether the background script was invoked using nohup. It's also almost impossible to rely on the presence of nohup.out as output can be redirected by user elsewhere at will.
There are 2 ways to accomplish what you want to do. Either bail out and warn the user or automatically restart the script in background.
#!/bin/bash
local mypid=$$
if [[ $(ps -o stat= -p $mypid) =~ "+" ]]; then
echo Running in foreground.
exec nohup $0 "$#" &
exit
fi
# the rest of the script
...
In this code, if the process has a state code +, it will print a warning then restart the process in background. If the process was started in the background, it will just proceed to the rest of the code.
If you prefer to bailout and just warn the user, you can remove the exec line. Note that the exit is not needed after exec. I left it there just in case you choose to remove the exec line.
One good way to find if a script is logging to nohup, is to first check that the nohup.out exists, and then to echo to it and ensure that you can read it there. For example:
echo "complextag"
if ( $(cat nohup.out | grep "complextag" ) != "complextag" );then
# various commands complaining to the user, then exiting
fi
This works because if the script's stdout is going to nohup.out, where they should be going (or whatever out file you specified), then when you echo that phrase, it should be appended to the file nohup.out. If it doesn't appear there, then the script was nut run using nohup and you can scold them, perhaps by using a wall command on a temporary broadcast file. (if you want me to elaborate on that I can).
As for being run in the background, if it's not running you should know by checking nohup.
I'm trying to script my commands that are run inside the pbrun shell. I've tried executing through a normal script, but that doesn't work because, to my understanding, pbrun is executed in its won subshell, making it hard, if not impossible, to pass commands to.
The only solution I'm thinking might work is that if I have a input/output text processor that listens to the terminal and responds accordingly.
I was able to send commands to the standard input of pbrun:
echo 'echo $HOSTNAME' | pbrun bash
I have a VM that I want running indefinitely. The server is always running but I want the script to keep running after I log out. How would I go about doing so? Creating a cron job?
In general the following steps are sufficient to convince most Unix shells that the process you're launching should not depend on the continued existence of the shell:
run the command under nohup
run the command in the background
redirect all file descriptors that normally point to the terminal to other locations
So, if you want to run command-name, you should do it like so:
nohup command-name >/dev/null 2>/dev/null </dev/null &
This tells the process that will execute command-name to send all stdout and stderr to nowhere (instead of to your terminal) and also to read stdin from nowhere (instead of from your terminal). Of course if you actually have locations to write to/read from, you can certainly use those instead -- anything except the terminal is fine:
nohup command-name >outputFile 2>errorFile <inputFile &
See also the answer in Petur's comment, which discusses this issue a fair bit.
I am writing my first ever bash script, so excuse the noobie-ness.
It's called hello.bash, and this is what it contains:
#!/bin/bash
echo Hello World
I did
chmod 700 hello.bash
to give myself permissions to execute.
Now, when I type
exec hello.bash
My putty terminal instantly shuts down. What am I doing wrong?
From the man page for exec:
If command is supplied, it replaces the shell without creating a new process. If no command is specified, redirections may be used to affect the current shell environment.
So your script process runs in place of your terminal and when it exits, so does your terminal. Just execute it instead:
./hello.bash