my first script :!)

[Michael Havens]

Well, I know no one will really care but me but I have to share!

I decided to follow the TLDP manual/workbook to learn BASH. I came to this
decision for a couple of reasons: the first being that it is likely the
most authoritative and the second was they have exercises whereas the IBM
pages didn't.

Well, I read the first chapter and got to the exercises. The project was to
write a script that would print the date and time, who is logged in, and
what the uptime of the system is; the I am supposed to ake all of that and
print it to a file.

I thought to myself, "But they haven't taught us anything!" I was about to
write to the user group I am part of and ask my infamous "how do I"
question when I stopped, took a breath, and figured I should at least try
to work it out on my own. So I figured the first line is a pound sign and
exclamation point but I was unsure of the order; was it !# or #!. So it
just so happens that this sequence of characters is called a sha-bang so
the exclamation point must come second. I'll try that first.
Then I burned some brain cells trying to figure how to run multiple
commands and print it all to a single file. I tried encapsulating
everything with curly brackets ({ }) but that gave an error of some sort.
Finally, after a couple of minutes, it came to me that they probably want
their readers to use a favorite search engine (duckduckgo in my case). So
after entering the parameters of the search some hits came up and after
looking through a few I found one that fit my question. How could I not
have realized how to do this? It is merely using the append file
redirection (>>)!  So this is what I wrote:

#! /bin/bash
    date >><file>&
    who >><file>&
    uptime>><file>
done

Luckily I realized that for there to be a 'done' there also needs to be
'do'. There is no 'do' therefore we don't need the 'done'.
So I ran the program and everything seemed to run without error, however,
did it write the data to a file? I then go back to the terminal and type
'more <file>'. Look at that! Everything is there.

Thu Mar  5 20:44:36 MST 2015
 20:44:36 up 9 days,  1:45,  2 users,  load average: 0.52, 0.55, 0.73
bmike1   tty8         2015-02-24 19:00 (:0)
bmike1   pts/2        2015-03-05 20:22 (:0.0)

:-)~MIKE~(-:
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