Hi all, What I need to do is very simple :) I just need to run a script every hour to check on a certain directory on the HP-UX server we have e.g. /tmp/tools to know what are the new files created in that directory and then it creates a link of those files in another directory e.g. /home/admin It will be a link just a link of the newly created files from the first directory into the second directory. Thanks a lot :)

cd /home/admin for file in /tmp/tools/* ; do $file=`basename $file` if [ ! -a $file ] ; then ln -s /tmp/tools/${file} $file fi done

Thanks David for your reply :) but your solution depends on that the old links are still in the /home/admin so what if these old links are being deleted regularly? I mean that the files are written in the first directory and then the link is created in the second directory. then we go fetch the files through the links and then delete the links for the files we fetched! And so on there will be no more than around 4 links in the second directory. I hope I cleared it a little bit more. And thanks once again :)

I think David's script does what you want, but the statement: $file=`basename $file` needs to have the leading $ removed. His script does not care if the files in /tmp/tools are newly created or not, but for each file in /tmp/tools, his script confirms that there is "something" of that name in the target directory, and if not, creates a link for that file. If you want to confirm that the "something" in the target directory is in fact a link and not something else such as a regular file or a directory, then use -h $file instead of -a $file.

It seems that I didn't explain myself well in the first response because what I meant agrees with what you said Jim but I ll explain more by giving an example: - let's assume that file1 and file 2 were created in the first directory so when this script proposed by David runs for the first time it will create a link of both files in the second directory. - Further if file3 was created in the first directory and for instance file1 link was removed from the second directory - then when this script runs at the next time it will find that there are no links for file 1 and file3 and create the links again! while I want is for this script to create a link for file3 only and ignore file1 which was already created earlier by the script. If I'm still not making myself clear please let me know and thanks very much for both of you :)

OK, got it. I will give it some thought.

LOGFILE=/tmp/link.log cd /home/admin for file in /tmp/tools/* ; do file=`basename $file` if [ ! -a $file -a `grep -w -c $file $LOGFILE` -eq 0 ] ; then ln -s /tmp/tools/${file} $file echo $file >> $LOGFILE fi done ===== Sorry about the leading $. You are right.