I only recently started programming. I have a shell script which contains a c-program. At the end of the script, the c-program is ran using the commands
gcc stadist.c -lm
a.out < XXXXX | sort -n -k3 > YYYYY
rm a.out
rm stadist.c
rm XXXXX
Running this script gives a.out: not found. The file YYYYY is created but it is empty. How can i solve this problem. I am on Linux ubuntu 16.04 LTS.
The shell cannot find a.out because it isn't looking in the current directory. That is best practice. (ie, do not add . to PATH). Just do:
gcc stadist.c -lm &&
./a.out < XXXXX | sort -n -k3 > YYYYY
rm a.out
rm stadist.c
rm XXXXX
Note that I added && after the invocation of gcc so that the script does not attempt to run a.out if the compilation fails. You'll probably want to add more robust error checking.
&& does is short circuit the command if the first fails. It is (almost) equivalent to if gcc stadist.c -lm ; then ./a.out ...; fi As for how the shell searches for binaries; IMO that's pretty important to understand, but suffice to say that by default it does not look in the current directory, so you need to explicitly tell it to by referencing the command with a relative path.It seems that you do not fully grasp what your shellscript does. If you are getting "./a.out: not found" when you run the script it means that the program did not compile correctly. This is probably due to the line:
rm stadist.c
where you actually delete your sourcefile, meaning the script will work at most once. You should check to see that you still have stadist.c somewhere and try to compile and run it outside of the script.
I have a shell script which contains a c-program....ummmm you might need to rephrase that../a.out./a.out- but I hope you have a backup of that source file....