[PLUG] Shell script error explanation needed

Rich Shepard rshepard at appl-ecosys.com
Thu Aug 11 15:32:39 UTC 2016


On Thu, 11 Aug 2016, chris (fool) mccraw wrote:

> well, here's where I'd start:

>> Subject: Output from your job       63

> That was job #63, whose run is logged somewhere so you can be sure of which
> script it is.  unfortuantely the queue for at(1) is emptied after the job
> runs so you can't use a tool like atq(1) to examine what happened.

   I looked in /var/log/ and found no reference to the job.

>> sh: line 67: mail.list: No such file or directory

> this is saying that the 67th line of some script referred to a file that
> was unavailable at runtime.  That's where I'd start looking for a mail.list
> file reference - and one that does not have a /full/path in front of it, so
> perhaps a cd to an expected directory failed, and/or the file moved
> (perhaps temporarily) from where the script typically finds it, or a
> filesystem was missing at runtime, or a million other reasons...

   I'll check this, but (as I wrote in response to David's message) passed
the full path to at.

> Seems like some script that ran has at least 67 lines.  It could be the
> case that a subordinate script called from the master script is the one
> throwing the error message.  The shell's built in error reporting is pretty
> minimal, as you see here :)

   Shouldn't be any other script. I'll set up a test mail.list and see what
happens

> Well, I'd check my mail logs to determine that.

   Nothing outgoing in /var/log/maillog.

> That error message doesn't specify what was happening with mail.list -
> perhaps it was *read* successfully, and then the script attempt laters to
> remove it or add to it and it had vanished in the meantime.

   Nope, it's still there.

   I'll read on error checking and add that to the script.

Thanks,

Rich




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