[PLUG] Shell script error explanation needed

[Steve Dum]

To answer your question about how the error can be at line 67 when the 
script only has 5 lines,
realize that at adds a bunch of stuff at the top of the script - from 
the man page of the at on my machine:
        The working directory, the environment (except for the variables 
BASH_VERSINFO,
        DISPLAY, EUID, GROUPS, SHELLOPTS, TERM, UID, and _) and the 
umask  are  retained  from
        the time of invocation.
so there is easily another 60+ lines to restore your environment to what 
it was when you ran at.

If you changed your test script  to read from a non existent file say, 
test-mail.list924 you should see
the error again.

I suspect the required facts to explain the failure are
1. what directory is the real mail.list file in?
2. what directory are you in when you submit the at job?

to be safe, you could add to the top of the script
    cd <directory where mail.list is found>

if you have root access, the easiest way to see what the script is, that 
at will be executing is to
go into /var/spool/at and copy the script elsewhere, to examine or play 
with.
On my system /var/spool/at has a directory named spool and the at jobs 
were of the form
a<some long number> I assume the number  encodes a sequence number and 
launch time.
do somthing like
    sudo bash
    ls /var/spool/at
    cp /var/spool/at/a0001601761670 /tmp/foo
    chown rshepard /tmp/foo
    exit
where of course the a0001601761670  is really whatever you see as a job 
name from the ls.

You could also write out info to a file from the batch job, like out 
from env, $PWD or even try cat'ing $0
but the scripts at generate on my system seem to make $0 (the name of 
the script being executed) useless,
as the actual at script generated, does all the setup then pipes the 
script into a shell.

steve

Rich Shepard wrote:
> On Thu, 11 Aug 2016, chris (fool) mccraw wrote:
>
>> Be that as it may, the shell script would have said "/path/to/mail.list -
>> file not found" if it was *using* that full path, so you are still (IMHO)
>> looking for an unqualified pathname use.
>     The test script ran correctly.
>
> test-1.sh:
>
> #!/bin/bash
>
> while read LINE; do
> ADDR=$(echo $LINE | cut -d: -f1)
> GRTG=$(echo $LINE | cut -d: -f2)
> m4 -D GREETING="$GRTG" test-1.m4 | mail -s 'Testing 1, 2, 3' $ADDR
> done < test-mail.list
>
> test-1.m4:
>
> GREETING:
>
>     This is a test message. That's all.
>
> test-mail.list:
>
> rshepard at twodogs.us:Rich
> rshepard at twodogs.us:Rich
> rshepard at twodogs.us:Rich
> rshepard at twodogs.us:Rich
> rshepard at twodogs.us:Rich
> rshepard at twodogs.us:Rich
> rshepard at twodogs.us:Rich
> rshepard at twodogs.us:Rich
> rshepard at twodogs.us:Rich
> rshepard at twodogs.us:Rich
> rshepard at twodogs.us:Rich
> rshepard at twodogs.us:Rich
>
> command issued:
>
> at -f ~/test-1.sh 08:40 am
>
>     I just verified that leaving off the '-f' flag prevents the command from
> being added to the at queue; the shell reports:
>
> syntax error. Last token seen: /
> Garbled time
>
>     Wonder what happened.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Rich
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