Bash newbie - how to execute multiple command?

[vanesta]

hi Guys, Victoria here!

I'm new to the forum, and in need of a guide on how to run multiple command on linux command line.

I want to rsync multiple folders

I know the rsync command but how to i make it into 1 script backup.sh

mount /dev/sdb1 /iscsi
rsync -vrplogDtH /var/lib/mysql/ /iscsi/mysql/
rsync -vrplogDtH /home/ /iscsi/home/

and how can i make them finished 1 command before jumping to another with verbose output.

Thank you so much guys!

[scottro]

Do you mean complete successfully? Actually, as you have it written, it should do what you want. It will finish the first command, then execute the next line.

If you do
rsync -vrplogDtH /var/lib/mysql/ /iscsi/mysql/ &&

It will only execute the second command if the first one completed successfully.

[dshaw256]

I don't want to comment on the wisdom of running those two particular commands at the same time, because I don't know what they are doing. But in general, you can issue a command with an & behind it, and it will run in the background. And if you direct stdout to a file, you can catch all the output from each command..

So:

mount /dev/sdb1 /iscsi
rsync -vrplogDtH /var/lib/mysql/ /iscsi/mysql/ > cmd1.txt &
rsync -vrplogDtH /home/ /iscsi/home/ > cmd2.txt &

...should work to run those two commands at the same time.

[marko]

She wanted the commands to run serially and not in the background
so don't use ampersands, also she wanted verbosity but not necessarily
to dump to files, so I'd suggest making a file called backup.sh that
contains:

#!/bin/sh
mount /dev/sdb1 /iscsi
rsync -vrplogDtH /var/lib/mysql/ /iscsi/mysql/
rsync -vrplogDtH /home/ /iscsi/home/

this is already verbose because of the -v option being used
on rsync. To retain the verbose output to a file just do:

if the shell is tcsh or csh: backup.sh >& outputfile
if the shell is bash or sh: backup.sh > output 2>&1


If you always want to write to the file, it makes more sense to put
the redirection in the backup.sh

#!/bin/sh
mount -v /dev/sdb1 /iscsi > outputfile 2>&1
rsync -vrplogDtH /var/lib/mysql/ /iscsi/mysql/ >> outputfile 2>&1
rsync -vrplogDtH /home/ /iscsi/home/ >> outputfile 2>&1

There's a few correctness things wrong with this, nowadays you'd
usually not do:
mount /dev/sdb1 /iscsi > outputfile 2>&1

but rather use mount's -L option flag to mount the device by
the filesystem label (you'd have to use e2label to set the
filesystems label to MyBackup)

mount -vL MyBackup > outputfile

and your /etc/fstab would have a related entry to associate
that with /iscsi:

LABEL=MyBackup /iscsi ext3 defaults,noatime 1 2

The problem with hardcoding /dev/sdb1 is that
sometime you might plug in some other usb devices before the
drive that has your iscsi named volume. That might make linux
map it to /dev/sdc1 and your script will break. Since mount -L
uses the actual label in the filesystem it mounts the right drive
each time no matter what the order the devices are found.


Mark

[dshaw256]

Whups. Sorry. Misread her intent.