Really dumb qustion about shell scripts

I have a Terminal command that I'd like to run when SuperDuper finishes
its cloning job. I see that SD! has a handy feature to "run shell
script" at the end of the cloning session.

Here's my dumb question. Promise you won't laugh.

How do I turn my Terminal command into a shell script that SuperDuper can
run?

 

Just enter the command into a text file (say, "mycommand"), and then
(here's the important part) make the file executable with

chmod +x mycommand

and pick some handy place to store it. Then give SD the full pathname of
the script file that you created, so it will know how to find it.

 

Well, that was easy enough! Thanks for helping out this clueless
scripting newbie.

 

While you are at the console, you might create an empty file using
touch <filename>
where <filename> is the file name.

Then open it in an editor, say TextEdit, using
open -a TextEdit <filename>

Hans Aberg

 

As has been hinted at, I would strongly suggest adding #!/bin/bash
on the very first line starting in column 1.

#!/bin/bash
your_command
or_commands
here
....

and then as indicated above, make the script executable using the
"chmod +x mycommand".

If your command does NOT use any scripting features specific to
one of the flavors of shell (sh, ksh, zsh, bash, csh, tcsh, ...)
then you can get away without the #!/bin/bash (or #!/bin/sh, or
#!/bin/ksh, or #!/bin/zsh, or #!/bin/csh, or #!/bin/tcsh, ...).

If you DO use shell specific features, but omit #!/bin/xyz, then
the highest likely hood is that you script will be invoked by
/bin/sh, as this is the default shell used by the system(...)
command, and most likely what SuperDuper! uses (I'm guessing, but
it is an educated guess).

Bob Harris

 

Thanks. The command works without the "#!/bin/bash". All the command is
is a fast-user-switch to the login window, which is invoked with this
command:

/System/Library/CoreServices/Menu\ Extras/User.menu/Contents\
/Resources/CGSession -suspend

Now when SD finishes running it switches to the login window before it
sleeps, which was what I wanted.

 

Just to be persnickety: does SD properly interpret a file with just the
command in it? By this I mean as opposed to being a proper shell
script file that begins something like

#!/bin/bash

and so on.

 

For me it works fine for me without that extra bit at the beginning.

 

Which on Mac OS X is the same as bash (try '/bin/sh --version').

Hans Aberg

 

Good point. One will have to watch for this carefully in cross-platform
development, as bash has a number of extensions that sh does not.

Hans Aberg

 

Shell scripts used to work just fine before the shebang was invented.
The default shell is /bin/sh.[/QUOTE]

To be exact, shell scripts work fine so long as they're written in the
default shell -- FOR THE OS YOU'RE USING. I've run more than one Unix
box whose default was csh, for example.

It can be kinda fun playing around w/ pound-splat constructs. I
forget what I did once but I called some completely different app once
(i.e. not a unix shell) to do some cool stuff in a script.