Simple find command

[Paul Sperry]

Greetings all,

I have a simple script to copy oracle dumps
across a nfs mount to another server that is offsite. Here is is.

#!/bin/sh
DATE=$(date +%m%d)0700
touch -t $DATE /tmp/reffile
find /usr/local/dumps -type f -name *.gz -newer /tmp/reffile -exec cp {} /offsite_mnt \;
sleep 5
rm -f /tmp/reffile


The find command is all on one line.
In the actual script I use full paths for all commands. but when I run it It comes back with:

/usr/bin/find: paths must precede expression
Usage: /usr/bin/find [path...] [expression]


Any Ideas ? I am loosing hair over this.

TIA
Paul

[Rick Garland · Accepted solution]

I put double quotes around the wildcard ("*.gz") and I also put the -name before the -type

[Paul Sperry]

Thanks Rick that did it.
I guess linux find is slightly different than HP-UX. Thanks again and happy hollidays

[Ivan Ferreira]

The -name test takes only one argument. In your command line, the shell is expanding the *s* into more than one argument before the find command is run.

Therefore you get the error you see. You should either escape any shell metacharacters in the -name argument or enclose that argument in quotes.

[Paul Sperry]

Ivan,

Thanks for the clearification.
Happy Hollidays

Paul

[Paul Sperry]

Hey all,

Well the script works fine when I run it from the command line. But when I try to schedual it in cron it doesn't work. No clues in the cron log or messages file.
the cron log shows it runs for 6 seconds
(sleep 5 + 1 sec) so my guess is the find is not working. Any ideas

TIA
Paul

[Alexander Chuzhoy]

you didn't provide us the crontab file,
anyway I suggest you to provide the full path of an executable in crontab.This executable would be a bash script with one command.In your case the find command.If it works-great!Otherwise try other simpler commands like "touch /tmp/filename". Isolate the problem in other words...
Hope it helps.

[Ivan Ferreira]

Cron jobs reports any errors that went to stdout and stderr by mail. You can configure in the crontab file the variable MAILTO= to indicate who should receive the mail, by default is the user.

Another way to debug is to redirect the ouput of the command to a log file, if this script is called clean.bash, configure your cron to run to something like this:

5 * * * * /usr/local/sbin/clean.bash > /var/log/clean.log 2>&1

[Paul Sperry]

Hey guys,

Thanks for the help, I am more of a HP-UX guy than a linux person. At any rate I finally got it working. For some reason I had to start and stop cron in order to get the log file to be created and the script worked. (0 byte logfile) I decided to stop logging the job and the thing quit working so I stopped and started cron again and the job worked again. So it seems that any time I make any changes to my cron jobs I have to restart crond. Something I never have to do in HP-UX. Or maybe my Linux server is flakey?

Once again thanks for your help
And Happy New Years to All.

Paul

[Ivan Ferreira]

I can warranty that you don't have to restart cron at any modifications. Are you editing using crontab -e? Do not edit directly the file in /var/spool/cron.

You only need to restart cron when you clean the cron log file (/var/log/cron), so cron can write to the file again.

[Paul Sperry]

Ivan,

Yes I was using crontab -e to edit my cron jobs. But honestly any time I changed my job it quit working untill I restarted crond.
Makes no sence to me but I am glad to hear this isn't a "normal" thing to have to do.
Perhaps I am behind on patches. We are mostly a HP-UX and windows operation but are favoring Linux over Windows for any new servers.

Thanks again
Happy New Years To All


Paul

[Muthukumar_5]

Try as,

#!/bin/sh

# Script
touch -t $(date +%m%d)0700 /tmp/reffile

# Will go to cron log
echo "Operation is Started :)"

for file in `find /usr/local/dumps -name "*.gz" -type f -newer /tmp/reffile`
do
cp ${file} /offsite_mnt;
done
sleep 1
rm -f /tmp/reffile

# Will go to cron log
echo "Operation is completed :)"

#END
exit 0

Edit crontab -e as,
5 * * * * path to script

and monitor cron log and post the result.

-Muthu