Re: Blacklisted Shell Script? --- SOLVED ---

Thank you for all that Joe.
Taking your earlier comments to heart, I'll "tidy" the script with 
indenting of the if-fi areas.
First I'll see if I'm happy with the sanity  of the13 if-fi entries.

That variable - IIRC it required defining or else I bombed on unknown 
stuff, and unary whatever. So, I had used the on-disc value, _knowing_ 
it would be "dunnie" :-[
I never intended (and still don't) that the script would be running for 
longer - it was/is to be a one-shot affair (even with crontab * * * * *).

TTYL;
DaveR

Joe Burpee wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 05, 2009 at 22:06:48 -0400, Dave wrote:
>   
>> I've  added the line
>>
>> echo "foolsafe"> /home/whacker/IP-Update/running_flag
>>
>> immediately ahead of
>>
>> running_flag=`cat /home/whacker/IP-Update/running_flag`
>>
>> at the beginning of the script to prevent a reoccurrence of this.
>>     
>  
> Sounds appealing Dave, but unfortunately this seems to defeat your
> mechanism for determining whether the script is already running.
>
> Maybe the safest way would be to insert something simple like the
> following in the "else" block for the main "if":
>
> echo "Script bypassed based on contents of file 'running_flag'."
>
> This may not be ideal for a cron job.  Instead you might want to just
> add a meaningful comment near the top of the script.
>
> Anyway you shouldn't feel bad about any of this Dave.  There are
> more sophisticated ways of dealing with these things, but all kinds of
> fancy software gets fouled up by stale or corrupt data.
>
> Glad I was able to help you find the problem.
>
> Joe
>
>   
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