Problem in making a script

[Nils Kassube]

Amrit Pal Pathak wrote:
> On Sat, Jul 2, 2011 at 5:07 AM, Nils Kassube <kassube at gmx.net> wrote:
> > You could extend the echo command with the rest of the text you
> > need in the line. Something like this:
> > 
> > echo -n "Please enter device name: "
> > read device
> > ...
> > echo "device = /dev/$device" >> "$TEMP"
> > 
>   Here $TEMP is temporaily file name?

Yes. At the line "..." I omitted the creation of that temp file etc. 
because I wanted to show how to use the echo command with the user input 
appended to the extra text.

>       Can I use here a variable then can replace $fname with
>      that variable in following code.

I'm not sure what you want to ask here. Anyway, you can name a variable 
whatever you want. It doesn't matter if it is "fname" or "device" or 
"donaldduck". It is only important that you later use the right variable 
when you write to the conf file. Of course it is much easier to 
understand the code if you use a variable name which tells you something 
about the designated contents. I was using "device" for clarity because 
the user input was a device name. I would expect some file name in a 
variable "fname" but feel free to use "fname" instead of "device".

> sudo wget http://202.164.53.116/~amritpal/edit/kannel.conf
> sudo chmod a+w kannel.conf

While these lines have nothing to do with your original question, I'll 
comment on them anyway. These lines are a bit strange because first you 
use sudo to wget a file, and then you change the permissions to make the 
file world writeable. If you don't use sudo for the wget command, you 
don't need to change the permissions afterwards. Never use sudo unless 
you really know it is needed.

> echo -n "Please enter device name: "
> read device
> echo "device = /dev/$device" >> "$TEMP"

Well, that line is in the wrong place. You can't write to a temporary 
file before you create it. If you have used the TEMP variable before, 
you might write to the wrong file. If it wasn't used before, it would 
simply be a syntax error.

> TEMP=$(mktemp)
> head -n $((29 - 1)) "kannel.conf" > "$TEMP"
> echo "$fname" >> "$TEMP"

Replace this line with the one that was in the wrong place above.


Nils