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The Complete Guide to Bash Programming

Script Parameters

Explore how to use positional parameters in Bash scripts to make flexible backup scripts. Understand how to pass input paths as parameters, the importance of quoting variables to handle spaces, and how to manage archive filenames to prevent overwriting previous backups. This lesson helps you write scripts that work with any directory, improving script reusability and reliability.

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Parametrizing the photo directory

Let’s suppose we moved our photos from the ∼/photo directory to ∼/Documents/Photo. If we want to support the new path in the backup script, we should change its code. The following shows how the new script looks:

#!/bin/bash

tar -cjf ~/photo.tar.bz2 ~/Documents/Photo &&
  echo "tar - OK" > results.txt ||
  { echo "tar - FAILS" > results.txt ; exit 1 ; }

cp -f ~/photo.tar.bz2 ~/backup &&
  echo "cp -
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