Variables as commands in bash scripts

Question

I am writing a very simple bash script that tars a given directory, encrypts the output of that, and then splits the resultant file into multiple smaller files since the bac

Answer 1

There is a point to only put commands and options in variables.

#! /bin/bash

if [ $# -ne 2 ]
then
    echo "Usage: `basename $0` DIRECTORY BACKUP_DIRECTORY"
    exit 1
fi

. standard_tools    

directory=$1
backup_directory=$2
current_date=$(date +%Y-%m-%dT%H-%M-%S)
backup_file="${backup_directory}/${current_date}.backup"

${tar_create} "${directory}" | ${openssl} | ${split_1024} "$backup_file"

You can relocate the commands to another file you source, so you can reuse the same commands and options across many scripts. This is very handy when you have a lot of scripts and you want to control how they all use tools. So standard_tools would contain:

export tar_create="tar cv"
export openssl="openssl des3 -salt"
export split_1024="split -b 1024m -"