How to send many commands to shell and wait for the command behind ends

Question

Hello I have around 20 commands and I have to send all of this to Unix shell, and copy the result, but I don't know how to do it.

I am not sure about what shell I have, because it is a small program connected to Mobile Network Managment, and with this small program we have access to send comands by line and recive the results by scream, for that reason I cannot use scripts for sending the commmands.

Command 1 - Connect with a server.

Wait until command 1 finish

Command 2- Update all the information from server 1 finish

Wait.

Command 3. Get some parameter.

... and more such commands.

I tryed with cmd1 | cmd2 | cmd3 and cmd1 & cmd2 & cmd3 and cmd1;cmd2

The problem is with cmd1 its connected to a RNC(Network element) and takes aroud 15 seconds, after that cmd2 has sense. but just work for the first cmd. Any clue, how to run this?

Answer 1

Usually just cmd1;cmd2;cmd3;cmd4 (if you wanted to write it on one line), or using cmd1 && cmd2 && cmd3 && cmd4 if you don't want to run cmd3 when cmd2 fails.

Alternatively to ; you can just write one command per line.

cmd1
cmd2
cmd3
cmd4

If you want the commands to run in parallel in background, you can also use

cmd1 &
cmd2 &
cmd3 &
cmd4 &
wait # for cmd1-4 to finish

Either of those methods can also be put in a shell script. There is little difference between what you write in a shell script and what you write in the actual shell itself.

Answer 2

Just use a script, a file containing the commands to run one after the other, like:

#!/bin/sh

command-01
command-02
...
command-20

The first line (shebang) tells to run the following commands using /bin/sh, make the file executable (chmod u+x your-little-script) then you can run it by ./my-little-script. This way you won't leave some step out ;-)

Read the manual for the shell, it provides a full programming language. Check out bash(1) if that is what is available, or else the Korn shell ksh(1). They offer lots of useful features for controlling the flow of control in scripts (or interactively, for that matter).

Hope this helps.

Answer 3

You could run something like expect on your local computer to send cmd1 and wait for it to finish before issuing cmd2 etc. You have to figure out a reasonable period to wait, or a specific output which indicate that the command is done, in order to write a proper Expect script.

Of course, cmd1; cmd2; cmd3; cmd4 in one command will execute the commands in sequence, one after the other.