Re: Script does not do what it is told to do

[Ken Heard <ken@heard.name>]

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I want at this time to thank all of you for taking the time to provide
various suggestions as to how to fix the problems I describe in my
original post and in my previous thread 'Signs of hard drive failure?'
My reason for the thank you is that early Monday morning 28 October I
am leaving for Thailand and will not be back in Toronto until
mid-April 2020 and so will not have time for any follow up before I
leave.

Consequently when my Toronto computer is closed tomorrow it will not
be opened or used for the next six months approximately. For those six
months I will be using my desktop computer in Thailand which will have
been idle from April 2019 to November 2019. I will however summarize
here what I have found out so far in Toronto.

With regard to possible hard disk failures, with the help of some of
you I found out that the internal two hard drives have some life left
in them.  What had failed however some of my backup portable devices,
a 1 tb portable USB hard drive and two of my six high capacity (32-64
tb) USB flash drives, all of which I use for back-ups.  What I think
had not failed was a SanDisk Extreme 500 (500 gb so they say, but
somewhat less) solid state USB portable drive.

So for my working files which I will be taking with me I am using one
of the 'good' 64 tb USB flash drives mount on /media/fde, and maybe
the the SanDisk on /media/ssda. My working files will be compressed
into some twenty tarballs written to the fde drive, but not on the
ssda for reasons explained below. I am also storing those tarballs in
Dropbox.

The scripts for these two devices follow.  Both are encrypted.
- ------------------------------------------------------
#!/bin/bash
# Script to open and mount fde

sudo cryptsetup luksOpen UUID=26bb9cea-4ac0-47fa-838b-067baeb1936f fde
mount /media/fde
- ------------------------------------------------------
#!/bin/bash
# Script to open and mount ssda

sudo cryptsetup luksOpen UUID=347eec80-ede8-4b10-bef6-24065ced3e97
ssda mount /media/ssda
- -------------------------------------------------------
As I had found that all these scripts could operate without changing
the working directory back and forth from /home/ken I removed from
them all the lines changing the working directories which shocked,
horrified and amazed many of you.

The first script above works; it can open the fde drive.  The second
one does not work, but it will work if the tar command is extracted
from the script and run independently in a virtual terminal.  (By the
way I have sudo set up to allow me to open every file without
password, as this is the only computer on the premises.)

The tar scripts now look like this.
- -------------------------------------------------------
#!/bin/bash
# Script to back up all browser files in directory /home/ken/mozilla.
echo here
tar -cpzf /media/fde/backups/kbrowsers.tgz  --exclude-caches
- --wildcards -T docs/tarlists/kbrowsers.lst
- -------------------------------------------------------
This one exceptionally has 'echo here" above the tar command at the
suggestion of Kushal Kumeran.  Also at his request I ran the following
two commands:
'which tarkbrowsers' which returned '/home/ken/bin/tarkbrowsers', and
'cat $(which tarkbrowsers)' which returned
- -------------------------------------------------------
# Script to back up all browser files in directory /home/ken/mozilla.
CURPWD=$PWD
cd /home/ken
tar -czf /media/ssda/backups/kbrowsers.tgz  --exclude-caches
- --wildcards -T docs/tarlists/kbrowsers.lst
cd $CURPWD
- -------------------------------------------------------
As this return includes the change of directories commands it is clear
that somewhere there is a series of extraneous scripts but the
software is being coy about telling me where they are.  As about a
fortnight ago all these scripts worked as they should have, it may be
possible that the ones which do not work now are those which I did not
change in the meantime.

So here is where the matter stands now.  I will be using these scripts
in Thailand and determine whether these idiosyncrasies occur there,
where I will have a buster machine instead of the stretch one I am
still using in Toronto.  So I may be on the thread again in Thailand,
and or possibly again in Toronto in April 2020.

Regards, Ken Heard







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