My almost first script. What's wrong?

[muxecoid]

#!/bin/bash

cd $HOME
cd Desktop

for (( i = 1; i >= 3; i++ ))
do

cp 'job.temp' "job_$i.qsub"


echo "./foo $i 5. 0. 133" > "job_$i.qsub"


done

Expected behaviour: 3 files that contain job.temp with an extra string at the end.
Observed: No new files. No error message. Absolutely nothing.
Question: What's wrong and what is the good way to do it?

[sisco311]

#!/bin/bash

cd $HOME
cd Desktop

for (( i = 1; i <= 3; i++ ))
do

cp 'job.temp' "job_$i.qsub"


echo "./foo $i 5. 0. 133" > "job_$i.qsub"


done

[heindsight]

for (( i = 1; i >= 3; i++ ))

Look carefully at that.

You're saying let i be 1, then as long as i is greater or equal to 3, increment i...

Try changing it to:

for (( i = 1; i <= 3; i++ ))

[namegame]

Just as an explanation of what sisco posted. In your original script, your loop variable, i never is "greater than" 3, you were basically stating that you want the loop to execute while i >= 3, which never occurs because i is initialized as 1.

EDIT: I also reported this to be moved to Programming talk.

[muxecoid]

Thanks. It's just a typo. I expected the problem to be in misunderstanding how shell scripts work and did not check the condition.

How do you debug shell scripts? In C I would just put a breakpoint in the middle of the loop to see what happened, what about this?

[heindsight]

Thanks. It's just a typo. I expected the problem to be in misunderstanding how shell scripts work and did not check the condition.

How do you debug shell scripts? In C I would just put a breakpoint in the middle of the loop to see what happened, what about this?

Try the -x option to bash. In other words, run your script like:

bash -x ./script.sh

Or change your

#!/bin/bash

to

#!/bin/bash -x

Or add a line like:

set -x

at the beginning (just after #!/bin/bash)

[Tuna-Fish]

Expected behaviour: 3 files that contain job.temp with an extra string at the end.

I think there is another, somewhat subtler bug on this line:

echo "./foo $i 5. 0. 133" > "job_$i.qsub"

The redirecting operator > means replace the contents of the target file with the output of the previous.

To append text, use >>

example:

$ echo "123" >test
$ cat test
123
$ echo "456" >test
$ cat test
456
$ echo "123" >>test
$ cat test
456
123
$