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Tag: bash

How to repeat a dash (hyphen) in shell

How can I repeat the character – n times in shell? I have read and tried this, but this does not work for -. It throws error invalid option. Below is the exact command that I used: Original posted line: printf ‘-%0.s’ {1..100} I also tried escaping – by putting a but in that case it r…

Run bash whiptail script after login with sudo

I’m creating a virtual machine configuration script using whiptail that I’d like to have automatically start after the user logs in. The thing is, that I don’t want the user to be root, however because the user will need to be able to change things like hostname, ip address, add directories,…

Bash debug calling stack

I’m using a generic procedure to trap and describe the error or abnormal situations, instead of the usual ‘2>…’ error construct. The idea will be to have a procedure like this simplified version: and then, used as in this example: The issues are: BASH_SOURCE is the running source. T…

Create a heredoc that doesn’t interpret anything

I’m writing a script for a friend who is not experienced with bash. The script generates a backup script, generates a crontab and runs crontab to create a cron job. I want to date these backups, so currently the script (what’s relevant) is: This, however, generates finalCutScript.bash with the dat…

Get a radius of a circle in bash shell

I need to write a script to find radius of a circle and then find the area while the circumference is given The formula is: RADIUS=CIRCUMFERENCE/(2 * PI) The problem is I cant make this formula work because bash doesn’t accept decimal division I read a lot of answers there but still can’t get what…

Read stdin in chunks in Bash pipe

I have some shell scripts that works with pipes like such: My bar.sh calls some command line program that can only take a certain number of lines of stdin. Thus, I want foo.sh’s large stdout to be chunked up in N number of lines to make multiple bar.sh calls. Essentially, paginate foo.sh’s stdout …