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BASH Shell: How to run several commands in Sequence or all at once

Posted by Vivek Gite [Last updated: February 6, 2007]

A quick question:

How do I run several commands in Sequence or all at once?

If you need to run several commands chain them with a ; (semi colon). It is a control operator or metacharacter.
General Syntax:
command1;command2;command3

Commands separated by a ; are executed sequentially; the shell waits for each command to terminate in turn. The return status is the exit status of the last command executed.
$ clear;date

Run command all at once

To run several commands all at once by putting an ampersand & at the end of the command line. For example start backup script:
# /root/ftpbackup.sh &

Now you don't have to wait finishing /root/ftpbackup.sh script.

Putting it all together

There might be thousands of *.bak file. You need to goto each directory and list all files in /tmp/list directory:
# for d in "/home/sales /home/dbs /data1"; do find $d -iname "*.bak" >> /tmp/list; done &

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Discussion on This Article:

  1. mike Says:

    Put commands on one line separated by ‘&&’ (no quotes), so if one command exits with exit status 1, then the remaining commands will not execute.

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