How to set incrontab in bash scripting ???

abubakar-malik · 03-07-2011, 04:52 AM

Hi all,

I have a question;

Is it possible to set incrontab in bash script? I tried to set normal crontab and it works like a charm but unfortunately not “incrontab”

I have two bash files; test-incrontab.sh and addlinetocrontab.sh and here are the contents of these files respectively;

Code:

#!/bin/sh
#`export EDITOR=/home/userName/addlinetocrontab.sh;crontab -e;`
`export EDITOR=/home/userName/addlinetocrontab.sh;incrontab -e;`

Code:

#!/bin/bash --login
# if [ "`crontab -l | grep -v '#' | grep home.sh | wc -l`" = 0 ]; then `echo "5 * * * * /home/userName/hello.sh" >> $1`; fi
if [ "`incrontab -l | grep -v '#' | grep home.sh | wc -l`" = 0 ]; then `echo "/home/userName/test-dir IN_CREATE /home/userName/hello.sh" >> $1`; fi

As you can see there are two enteries in each file. One for normal crontab and other one for incrontab. When i run "test-incrontab.sh" like following;

Code:

./test-incrontab.sh

crontab works perfectly and i can see cron job set but for incrontab it just does not work. No error either! I am only getting this back "table unchanged"

I have been trying to fix this for last 5,6 hours but no luck at all

Any ideas????

Regards,
A.Malik

tommyttt · 03-08-2011, 01:25 AM

For starters, we need more information. At least distro and version, kernel in use, which desktop, etc.

Also, what is incrontab? I haven't used a distro that has that file/directory.

Tom

abubakar-malik · 03-08-2011, 02:42 AM

Hi Tom, here is the information you asked for. I hope it will help.

I am writing the commands and their corresponding ouput;

Command: cat /etc/redhat-release

Code:

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 5.4 (Tikanga)

Command: cat /proc/version

Code:

Linux version 2.6.18-164.10.1.el5 (mockbuild@hs20-bc2-5.build.redhat.com) (gcc version 4.1.2 20080704 (Red Hat 4.1.2-46)) #1 SMP Wed Dec 30 18:35:28 EST 2009

Command: uname -r

Code:

2.6.18-164.10.1.el5

Command: uname -a

Code:

Linux nameoftheMachine 2.6.18-164.10.1.el5 #1 SMP Wed Dec 30 18:35:28 EST 2009 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

And here is the link from where we downloaded incrontab
http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/linux-i...e-directories/

Any more info?

skiron · 03-01-2016, 04:18 AM

I know this topic is old, but the question is a good one and deserves a complete answer.

The reason why you get the "table unchanged" error is because incrontab command checks for the mtime of the tmp file before installing it. And since "echo" does not change the file's update time, to get your script to work, you need to add a command to update the mtime, the "addlinetocrontab.sh" script becomes:

Code:

#!/bin/bash --login
if [ "`incrontab -l | grep -v '#' | grep home.sh | wc -l`" = 0 ]; then 
     `echo "/home/userName/test-dir IN_CREATE /home/userName/hello.sh" >> $1`
     sleep 1
     touch $1
fi

BW-userx · 03-01-2016, 08:33 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by tommyttt

For starters, we need more information. At least distro and version, kernel in use, which desktop, etc.

Also, what is incrontab? I haven't used a distro that has that file/directory.

Tom

I hardly think you really need all of that information

incrontab

it is a GNU/Linux based program, .