On Sun, Oct 25, 2015 at 11:01:30PM -0400, Michael Havens wrote:
> >
> >
> > Take it slowly, at this point the main things you need to do are to
> > learn (the cp / tar business), and then to remember what you learn.
> >
> 
> Ken, could you recommend something to read?

Ah, I see you have stopped top posting.  Thanks.

As I said in the reply I posted a minute ago, much of this is
undertanding how your own scripts fail.  For that, there is no
substitute for gathering evidence (in this case, the error message
from the relevant program fragment run by configure).

When my own scripts break unexpectedly, and I cannot see what is
wrong (and yes, that happens fairly often, most recently while
trying to suppress some EXIF tags in a photo - I still need to get
back to that, and the time before that was when extracting a tarball
and using a specific field to identify the directory name broke on a
perl module which used some BSD variant of tar to package it ) I scatter
things like

echo 'at 001' &&
echo 'at 002' &&

at various places to see where the script went - there is nothing
worse than thinking a script broke at a particular command when in
fact it was at a completely different place.  Oh, and not everything
in the debugging code wants the '&&' if you have conditionals (if
... etc) : it *really* hurts when attempts to instrument code cause
more problems - yes, again, been there, done that.

For more general things, the 'prerequisites' page of the Preface has
a couple of links.  The Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide is also
useful as a reference -  perhaps skim it, and then use google in
your favourite (graphical) browser when you need to check the
details of something.

Also, 'info bash' (if you can get on with info) or 'man bash'
although like most documentation you need to know what the author
called the item.  Nowadays, googling for things in natural language,
such as 'how do I include a file in bash' often offers useful
suggestions of what to search for.  But that might only work for me,
because google knows so much about what I search for ;-)

ĸen
-- 
Il Porcupino Nil Sodomy Est! (if you will excuse my latatian)
  aka "The hedgehog song"
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Do not top post on this list.

A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style

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