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I have a list of commands I would like to paste into the terminal so that they run one after the other.

Initially they run fine, but commands later on are being truncated.

Example command:

ogr2ogr -nlt PROMOTE_TO_MULTI -progress -skipfailures -overwrite -lco PRECISION=no -f PostgreSQL PG:"dbname='natural_earth' host='localhost' port='5432' user='natural_earth' password='natural_earth'" 50m_physical/ne_50m_lakes.shp

There are about 150 of these commands, they are stored in gedit with line wrapping off and are being pasted as a block straight into the terminal.

Expected result:

$ ogr2ogr -nlt PROMOTE_TO_MULTI -progress -skipfailures -overwrite -lco PRECISION=no -f PostgreSQL PG:"dbname='natural_earth' host='localhost' port='5432' user='natural_earth' password='natural_earth'" 50m_physical/ne_50m_lakes.shp
0...10...20...30...40...50...60...70...80...90...100 - done.

This works for about the first 30 commands, after which I get a varying level of truncation on the commands, for example:

$ ogr2o
ogr2o: command not found

$ ogr
ogr: command not found

$ ogr2ogr -nlt PROMOTE_TO_MULTI -progress -skipfailures -overwrite -lco PRECISION=no -f PostgreSQL PG:"dbname='natural_earth' host='localhost' port='5432' user='natural_earth' password='natural_earth'" 50m_physical/ne_50m_graticules_all/ne_50m_grati

FAILURE:
Unable to open datasource `50m_physical/ne_50m_graticules_all/ne_50m_grati'

So I am new to Linux. I was wondering if there was a better way to run these than copy & paste from gedit?

I am running Linux Mint 15 "olivia" Cinnamon 32-bit.

Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
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Vesanto
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    Presuming there's nothing else in the gedit buffer, save it as a file and run it through the shell via sh [filename]. – goldilocks Sep 25 '13 at 20:32

2 Answers2

5

Just put the commands you want to run in a special file, and execute it as a shell script. Either by invoking a shell with an argument:

sh your_commands

or by prepending the commands with a hashbang and marking the file as executable with chmod a+x your_commands:

#!/bin/sh
your commands
go
here

which will make it behave as a regular binary and you will be able to just execute

 /path/to/your_commands

Alternatively you can also use the source functionality of your shell, which executes the commands from a file inside of the current shell (as opposed to spwaning a new shell which is what the two above will do):

source your_commands

or

. your_commands

(both have the same meaning).

peterph
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5

Welcome to Stack Exchange, and also to Linux Mint!

You ask whether there is a better way than paste-into-terminal to run a long series of commands. As it happens, there is: save the commands into a file, and run it as a shell script.

E.g. if you save your commands in ~/scripts/myscript.sh (~ is the abbreviation for your home directory), you can run it by entering these commands:

# change directory to where the script is
cd ~/scripts
# run the script with bash (most scripts are bash scripts)
bash myscript.sh

Pay attention to your working directory

One thing to look out for: the directory from where you run bash myscript.sh will be used as the working directory. If your script talks about the file 50m_physical/lakes.sh, which is in your ~/mylakesproject directory, then this will work:

cd mylakesproject
bash ~/scripts/myscript.sh
# ~/mylakesproject/50m_physical/lakes.sh exists

and this will not work:

cd myotherproject
bash ~/scripts/myscript.sh
# ~/myotherproject/50m_physical/lakes.sh does not exist

and neither will this:

cd scripts
bash myscript.sh
# ~/scripts/50m_physical/lakes.sh does not exist

Good luck, and have fun!

Esteis
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