.BRD and .MIX files that get deleted. Creating them

Question

I'm running a BBS. A software I ported from DOS to Linux. Impulse BBS. I'm having problems with the message base files. The problem is, it deletes the .BRD files, for some reason, and that halts the system. And crashes the BBS. I need to figure out a way to create those .BRD files when missing. Here's a script I wrote:

#!/bin/bash

inotifywait --daemon --outfile /home/imp/imp/test.log -m /home/imp/imp/msgs -e create 
while read path action file; do
    echo "The file '$file' appeared in directory '$path' via '$action'"
    for name in /home/imp/imp/msgs/*.MIX; do
            touch "${name}.BRD"
    done
done

It doesn't appear to be working, though. It does not actually touch the .BRD file(s). These .BRD files can be 0-byte length in size. I'm using inotifywait because it seems to be the best way to address this situation. I have other scripts that utilitze inotifywait, and they suit my needs perfectly.

Answer 1

Without looking too much at the inotifywait bit of your code, it looks as if the inner part of the loop touches a file based on what's in the name variable:

for name in /home/imp/imp/msgs/*.MIX; do
        touch "${name}.BRD"
done

The value of $name will be a pathname with a filename at the end that has the .MIX filename suffix.

Touching $name.BRD will create a file with a .MIX.BRD filename suffix, whereas I believe that you might want the original .MIX suffix replaced by .BRD.

This does that:

for name in /home/imp/imp/msgs/*.MIX; do
        touch "${name%.MIX}.BRD"
done

${name%.MIX} removes .MIX from the end of the value of $name.

The code probably also lacks a | at the end of the inotifywait command, to be able to feed its output into the while read loop:

#!/bin/sh

inotifywait --daemon --outfile /home/imp/imp/test.log -m /home/imp/imp/msgs -e create |
while read path action file; do
    printf 'The file "%s" appeared in directory "%s" via "%s"\n' "$file" "$path" "$action"

    for name in "$path"/*.MIX; do
            touch "${name%.MIX}.BRD"
    done
done

Here, I've also taken the liberty to change the echo to a printf (as it's outputting variable data), and of using $path in the inner for loop, which I hope is correct. The code doesn't use any special bash features, so I've changed the shell to /bin/sh as well.

Depending on how inotifywait works and what $file is and what you want to do, it may be enough to touch a file based on $file rather than looping through all files in the directory.