Bunnyhop is right.
There is an unmatched " on that line. I think that's where your problem is. Try this instead:

sst="/web/sites/sitestatstable/index.html"

The script doesn't report an error until it matches that stray " with the next one it finds way down on line 14 and tries to figure out what to do next.

Sheesh, that's just increcible. I don't understand how I could miss something so obvious, but I do it a lot. Tunnelvision I guess.

Thanks for the help guys.

Ok, next stupid question. The script gets a list of domains to search for in the raw log files from a text file called domains.txt. The command is something like:

analyzelogs.sh domains.txt

What I don't understand is why the names change. In the second line, the first input variable (did I say that right?), $1 is assigned the name "serverlist" yet when the time comes for the while loop, which scans the logs looking for each individual domain, it seems to change to "servername". Shouldn't those be the same?

serverlist = $1
while read serverlist
do some stuff

In case anyone is wondering, this scipt was written by a former tech, and works great on a dedicated server with a single raw log file. I'm trying to modify it for use on a virtual account where I have access to the raw logs, but each domain has it's own file.

I seem to be getting stuck in an endless loop. I pared the thing down to just try and read the domains.txt file and print out the names of the domains on the list with no more processing.

#!/bin/bash
serverlist=$1
sst="/web/sites/sitestatstable/index.html"
printf "Analyzing the Log Files...one moment please"

while read servername

do
printf $servername

if [ -f /var/log/apache/$servername ]
then
printf "Y"

else
printf "N"

fi

done



No luck.

If you did paste the whole script and there's nothing between these two lines...


printf "Analyzing the Log Files...one moment please"

while read servername


then "servername" should be "serverlist".

I tried it that way swedguy. Makes perfect sense to me. It prints the little greeting message, then just hangs up.

What I pasted is the entire test script i'm trying to run, just to see why i'm not getting paste that point on the real script.

I'll try it again though. Ya never know. Any other ideas/thoughts would be appreciated. Maybe a problem reading the text file with the list of domains? (there's only one on there right now).

Thanks again

ahhh, I was looking at the wrong thing.

"read" waits for you to type something.

while read servername


If you start the program and then type "domain.com", it will assign domain.com to the variable "servername" and check if /var/log/apache/domain.com is an ordinary file.

That makes sense. It's not stuck in an endless loop, it's waiting for some input.

So how do I tell it to read from a file, one line at a time and then "do" something with each line. On the version of the script that's working, I don't have to enter any input. That's all done from the crontab, which starts a small script that stops the server, rotates the logs, then calls another script to analyze the logs, with the inputs specified by the small script

./analyzelogs domains.txt

with all the "domain.coms" listed in the .txt file.

Here is an example of a bourne shell "for loop" that does something with each item in domains.txt:

for var in `cat domains.txt`
do
echo $var
done

More info here:
http://unix.about.com/library/course/blshscript-l7a.htm

Another good guide is Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide :)

Great info guys. Very much appreciated.

I've got a ton of stuff bookmarked for perl, but I was having trouble finding shell scripting sites. Don't know why.

Thanks again
SS

rather than dumping the whole file as
arguments to a for loop like this:
for line in `cat $filename`
It would be better to wkeep the while loop:
while read servername
and redirect the standard input of the script when you call it:
thescript.sh