Dtyjlui

This may be a simple question but...

I have an update.sh file with the following:

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get upgrade

When I run this using ./update.sh (after setting it to executable),
it asks me to enter my sudo password. Will this run both commands, and I can essentially only run this script once and have my apt-get update/upgrade commands taken care of?

Thanks everyone

The way sudo works is that by default it gives you 15 minutes before it will ask for password again. So yes, using the two commands, will work perfectly fine, and depending on how long apt-get update runs you will need to enter password once.

However, this is not the best practice. Instead, I would suggest making your whole script run with sudo instead of placing it in front of each command in file. In other words, the script should be:

#!/bin/bash

apt-get update

apt-get upgrade

And run it as

sudo  ./my_script.sh

Notice that here we're using #!/bin/bash line to use bash shell as interpreter. This is very different from /bin/sh. For what you're doing it makes no difference, but if you need to be aware that they differ in syntax of some of the operators.

However, even better approach would be to get rid of script altogether and use function or alias that does what you want. Scripts are really for large amounts of code that you want to reuse. For 2 - 3 lines a function or alias in ~/.bashrc file that's going to be sufficient.

Personally I'd make something like this in my ~/.bashrc

alias agu="sudo bash -c 'apt-get update && apt-get upgrade'"

Don't forget to set DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive for those pesky prompts about which version to maintain:

sudo DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt-get upgrade -y;

If you don't do this your script will hang in patching limbo. So if you were going to do this in a script I would do the following:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

set -e



patching(){

    # sudo specified because this was from my bootstrap script for an

    # ec2 instance remove the sudos as previously stated if you are 

    # going to exec it from your current shell

    sudo apt-get update -y;

    sudo DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt-get upgrade -y;

};



patching;

The previously stated methods will work... until they don't.

I had to refer back to a previous script that I wrote to find this variable.

Hopefully, it helps someone else with their patching/bootstrap script.

Why not simply run:

apt-get update && apt-get upgrade