"md5" fails as dir name ?

[Gentree]

Hi,

I have been banging my head against this problem all evening but have finally tracked it down to a very odd bash error.

I need to copy some files like the md5 checksums on Suse, so I decided to make a temp dir called md5 to work on them but the directories never got created.

No error to console , nothing in logs, mkdir did not seem to return any error code either.

I finally found that if I called it md55 or just about any other name it worked as expected. I can also do I from cli, so why the hell cant bash do it within a script and more over why dont I get an error?

Code: Select all

#!/bin/bash

READBACK=/wine/suse-readback/;
TARGET=/wine/SU102-DVD/;
CD_ISO_DIR=/var/www/localhost/htdocs/;
DVD_ISO_DIR=/wine/suse-dvd/;
ISOBASENAME="openSUSE-10.2-GM-i386-";
pwd

[ -d $TARGET ] && rm -rf $TARGET;
mkdir -p $TARGET;
#[ -d $READBACK ] || mkdir -p $READBACK

echo "i586">files.txt;
echo "i686">>files.txt;
echo "noarch">>files.txt;
for PLATFORM in `cat files.txt` ; do
#  PLATFORM="i686";
MD5="md5";
#  mkdir -p $TARGET$MD5;

 mkdir -p $TARGET$MD5 || echo "make md5 failed";
done

  echo  $TARGET$MD5$PLATFORM;

now if anyone can explain I'd like to hear it.

TIA, Gentree.

[iphands]

Weird...

Code: Select all

#!/bin/bash
TARGET="tmp/";
MD5="md5";
mkdir -p ${TARGET}${MD5} || echo "make md5 failed";

This does work for me....

I'd like to know too though... I'm a big bash person.

[Gentree]

thanks for the reply.

I have got a bit further by putting braces around everything and replacing all literals by vars. A bit of a hack but I obviously need to read up on bash syntax.

What is confusing me in debugging this is that these lines are failing without giving and error condition or message so my || echo "this bit failed" clauses are not providing any level of checking.

can you help with that?

If I had some feedback that things were failing I'd have more chance of tracking the error.

Thx.

[Genone]

That's probably because a) the variables expanded to *something* and b) the -p option doesn't cause an error if the dir already exists. Take this case as a good example why you should always use quotes and braces when referencing variables.

PS: you don't need all those semicolons

[iphands]

PS: you don't need all those semicolons

ditto....