When you have to write a lot of scripts to automate things eventually you are going to hit the need to have a variable, but what if you need 2 or 3 variables, and what if those need to be read from a file and imported into your running script in real-time as variables? No problem we have you covered, with this simple guide you should be looping through files and fetching variables for your scripts like a professional!
First of all, let’s create our file with a bunch of variables, as you will see below we have some variables, in column 1 we have the ping command, in column 2 the tracepath (traceroute) command, and then finally in column 3 we have and IP address
Example data:
ping tracepath 1.2.3.4
ping tracepath 2.3.4.5
ping tracepath 6.7.8.9
After putting the data above in a file save it as data in the /tmp directory.
Now we need to create the script that will use that data, for example:
while read -r first second third; do
$first $third > /tmp/$thrid.ping.results
$second $third > /tmp/$second.traceroute.results
done What that does line by line is:
Line 1: read line by line and capture the first, second and third as variables (you can do more than three) then do something.
Line 2: because the first word in the first column is ping, $first is equal to writing ping in your script $third is the IP as it is the third column so you are pinging the IP then you are also using the IP address in the file name ($third) to record the results $third.ping.results will produce files named 1.2.3.4.ping.results 2.3.4.5.ping.results and so on.
Line 3: This is similar to line 2 except instead of ping we are using tracepath with is represented by column 2 $second and again is recording the results using the IP address, this will product files named 1.2.3.4.tracepath.results 2.3.4.5.tracepath.results
Line 4: This is where we tell the script where to find the input file, in plain English,
it means loop through this file until done.
This is a very simple example however it is functional and should give you the tools you need to create your own scripts,
Another practical example using only 2 columns:
You want to create a set of iptables rules that blocks a list of IP’s you may have got from your security logs from various ports
You build your file and save it as /tmp/data
Example data:
1.2.3.4 22
2.3.4.5 80
6.7.8.9 443
Now you have 2 options, you can either use the data to run the desired commands directly or you can run a script that then builds a list of iptables rules you might want to execute on multiple servers later:
To run the commands directly using the variables:
while read -r first second; do
iptables -A INPUT -p tcp -i eth0 ! -s $first --dport $second
In the above example, $first represents the IP address, $second represents the port
If you want to make a script that simply generates a bunch of iptables commands to be saved and used later it would look something like this:
while read -r first second; do
echo "iptables -A INPUT -p tcp -i eth- ! -s $first --dport $second" >> /tmp/ruleset1
done In the above example, the commands containing the variables will be converted into the actual data 1 line at a time from your data file will be exported to /tmp/dataset1 and will look something like this:
iptables -A INPUT -p tcp -i eth0 ! -s 1.2.3.4 --dport 22
iptables -A INPUT -p tcp -i eth0 ! -s 2.3.4.5 --dport 80
iptables -A INPUT -p tcp -i eth0 ! -s 6.7.8.9 --dport 443The lists can be as long or as short as you want.
