help fine

[sauser]

hey guys thanks for answering my last post you helped me a lot. Well I have one more question. I was writing a real simple script just to copy folders.

so the command i was issuing was liek that

cp -R /home/$username /home/sauser/$username


I was just doing backup of all users folders.

So anyways when i issue this command from the command prompt. It works just fine. When it comes to the perl script It gets all messed up with error messages.

The line i wrotein perl was like that
` cd -R "/home/$username" "/home/sauser/$username"`

The error it was giving was no such file or directory.

 

[goBoating]

Help us out here... what are the errror messages?


keep the rudder amid ship and beware the odd typo

 

[sauser]

the error meesage was:

/home/$username no such file or directory and /home/sauser/$username no such or directory

what puzzles me is that when i run that same command from command line it works just fine!

 

[toolkit]

sauser,

Some things to consider

Did you mean cp -R, instead of cd -R (hence you would be trying to cd to the -R directory ;-) )

Also, if $username a shell variable? If so, you will need to export this variable to the environment, and then call using the %ENV hash in perl:

ksh:       export username=$(whoami)
csh:       setenv username `whoami`
then perl: my $username = $ENV{'username'};

Also, the following code may be a bit cleaner:

my $source = qq</home/$ENV{'username'}>;
my $target = qq</home/sauser/$ENV{'username'}>;
my $cmd    = &quot;cp&quot;;
my $opts   = &quot;-R&quot;;

system $cmd, $opts, $source, $target;

I think this should work. Unfortunately not in front of my UNIX box at the moment. Happy coding, cheers NEIL

 

[sauser]

yeah i mean cp sorry

oh i frogot to tellyou soemthing all those usernames are coming from text file
I have a list of users in a text file

Alex

 

[toolkit]

OK. So your code looks something like:

$cmd  = "cp";
$opts = "-R";
open USERS, $userfile or die;
while( $user = <USERS> ) {
    chomp $user;
    $src  = &quot;/home/$user&quot;;
    $dest = &quot;/home/sauser/$user&quot;;
    system $cmd, $opts, $src, $dest;
}

Note the very important chomp command. Otherwiser, the $user variable would contain an end of line character ('\n' on UNIX), so that the command seen by the system call would actually be:

cp -R /home/fred
/home/sauser/fred

For debugging purposes, you should print out what is being passed to the system command, just to make sure all is as expected, eg:

print "cmd: $cmd, opts: $opts, src: $src, dest: $dest\n"

Hope some of this helps s-) NEIL