Re: counting shell args

[Scott Taylor <scott@dctchambers.com>]

At 01:12 PM 12/16/02, Mike Dresser wrote:
>On Mon, 16 Dec 2002, Scott Taylor wrote:
>
>The worst part about writing this backup script of mine was finding the
>return status from the previous pipe in the script.
>
>smbtar -s $pcname -x $share -p $password -u $username -t - -X /win95 
>/win98 | gzip -1 > $filename.tar.gz
>         if [ $PIPESTATUS -eq 0 ] && [ `ls -s $filename.tar.gz | awk 
> '{print $1}'` -gt 25 ]; then
>
>$PIPESTATUS was hard to find.

That should be very useful to know. :)

Now you have me curious (grr...I just got over that) why do you care if 
there are more than 25 blocks in your zipped file?

>All that because smbtar doesn't properly report errors, you have to
>check that it did in fact report a zero error return, AND verify it
>didn't just dump a 0 byte file cause the machine was unreachable.

quite painful.

>Even
>so, if the Windows PC crashes in the middle of the backup(happens enough
>to be annoying!), it'll still think the backup ran just fine, and dump a 0
>status back at you, making the backup incomplete.

Even better if the WinThing crashes on a Windows user that uses file names 
like:
"This is my file that has numbers in it from last year end" on a set of 
subdirectories that make the filename over 250 chars long.
Yes, I've seen that!  LMAO  Just try to recover that from your tar file. Ugly!

>Most odd. :D

Yes, the SMB/CIFS world is not a perfect world, but just look at what they 
are trying to perfect. ;0)

Scott.