Counters in shell

Question

I am looking for a shell script where counter needs to be set for input paramter and do action once the count reaches to 5. The problem is there could be n number of input parameter and action should also be dependent on time ... Lets suppose if within 60 mins if count reaches upto 5 then which ever action i want to do .......

I found somthing like below but there is no explanation in this programm.....Please help...

#!/bin/sh
COUNTER=0
VALUE="-1"
echo "Enter a series of lines of numbers separated by spaces."
read LIST
IFS=" "
for VALUE in $LIST ; do
    eval ARRAY_$COUNTER=$VALUE
    eval export ARRAY_$COUNTER
    COUNTER=$(expr $COUNTER '+' 1) # More on this in Paint by Numbers
done

# print the exported variables.
COUNTERB=0;
echo "Printing values."
while [ $COUNTERB -lt $COUNTER ] ; do
    echo "ARRAY[$COUNTERB] = $(eval echo '$'ARRAY_$COUNTERB)"
    COUNTERB=$(expr $COUNTERB '+' 1) # More on this in Paint by Numbers
done

Thanks

Answer 1

If your script is going to be called multiple times then you need to keep the counter in some external persistent form, a environment variable or file. In this case ARRAY_n is exported for this purpose.