Strange shell script behavior 1

[pwozney]

I'm writing a script to automatically create a backup of my filesystem which I will then burn to a cd. Everything except this works.

BACKUP_NAME="phoenix"
BACKUP_DIR="/$BACKUP_NAME"
CREATE_FS="find . -mount -depth -print0 | cpio -apdmu0 $BACKUP_DIR"
echo "$CREATE_FS"
cd /
$CREATE_FS

Yields this:

find . -mount -depth -print0 | cpio -apdmu0 /phoenix

find: paths must precede expression
Usage: find [path...] [expression]

Very strange I say.

If I run just this: "find . -mount -depth -print0" outside of the script it does what you would expect, flooding my screen with gobs and gobs of filenames.

What do you think? It actually worked fine inside the script...until I moved the command to a variable name. Why is it behaving differently now?

 

[SteveR77]

Set up xtrace. The only time that I have seen that error related to find is when the command line attempts to parse the command arguments instead of allowing the find command to do what you wish.

Part of the reason why it may be working fine from the command line is you just happened to be in the directory where the files exist so the command line passes the proper information to the find command.

The only way I know to correct this is to double quote the find arguements so the command line does not attempt to parse them.

Hope this helps you.

Steve

 

[vgersh99]

eval $CREATE_FS

vlad
+----------------------------+
| #include<disclaimer.h> |
+----------------------------+

 

[pwozney]

Thanks vgersh99!

This worked:
eval $CREATE_FS

I did try to trace this script out, but I couldn't figure out how to get strace to show the command line options that were passed to find...anyway it works like a charm now!

Thanks,

Paul