Bash Open Questions
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How can I redirect the output of the script to both standard output and a log file? Answer: duplicating fds is not sufficient, because it duplicates the file descriptor number, not the data. But you can still use tee.
- Somewhere the content of variables in my script lose whitespace.
echo "$var" - quoting. See BashPitfalls for more.
- How can I ensure that only once instance of my script is running at a time?
How can I handle command line arguments in a shell script? Answer: getopts(1)
- How can I have variable variables, e.g. myvar=prefix$othervar?
Answer: eval
If othervar is an integer, use an array instead.
- How can I make bash set the xterm title to the command it is currently executing?
- How to determine Yesterday's date? Answer: date -d'yesterday'
- How to convert Unix time stamps to a date (and vice versa)? Answer: GNU date, awk+strftime()
- How to redirect stderr to a pipeline?
command 2>&1 | command
To discard stdout entirely: command 2>&1 >/dev/null | command
- How can I redirect file names using sequential numbers to avoid overwriting existing ones? Answer: mv --backup=numbered