a truly accidental script

i`m testing and trying different things with shell scripts, mostly because i really don`t know anything of it.
yesterday i was trying some while loops, performing some huge additions; but i guess that i did something very bizarre almost stupid; because all of a sudden, the free space of my hd started to shrinck.
here is a screen dump of the script:

#!/bin/bash

COUNTER=200000
until [ $COUNTER -lt 100000 ]; do
echo -----------------------------> $COUNTER
let COUNTER-=1
done
[Thu Feb 1][23:19:25][root@sicanderbul][/var/tmp:]

>>setterm -dump

to all of you it must be obvious, but this `thing` created a lot of very small files with nothing but `--------` on it.
looking at that right now, i understand why that hapenned,ut what i don`t understand is why the files find their way to 2 diferent directories, /etc/rc.d and /var/tmp directories, why is that?

When you do:
echo --------> $COUNTER
you're redirecting the exit of the echo program to the file $COUNTER instead of putting the string on the screen (as I suppose you wanted to do, just take it out). Each time $COUNTER changes you create a new file. About the way it goes to these directories I'm not very sure 'bout it and seems to be very strange since you don't change your path during execution.

thanks elric, yes, i was trying to echo to the screen that `------>`.
looking from a distance, it really looks stupid and obvious.
i guess the files did `find their way` into those directories because i was executing the program while *in* those directories.
thank you very much.

You could just change $COUNTER to /dev/null, and it wouldn't be a problem.

Just a note. When you are going to echo a combination of multiple words and variables, enclost them in double quotes. As in:

echo "-----------------------------> $COUNTER"

The problem was that it took the '----' as being test, the '>' as being the redirector and the contents of $COUNTER as being the file name. If you wanted to log this info to a log file, you can add:

FILENAME="filename"
date > $FILENAME
COUNTER=200000
until [ $COUNTER -lt 100000 ]; do
echo "-----------------------------> $COUNTER" >> $FILENAME
let COUNTER-=1
done

If you would like to both view in real time and also save to a file you can do:

echo "-----------------------------> $COUNTER" | tee $FILENAME

The tee command will make a copy of the text to $FILENAME and output another to stdout. -mk

------------------
If it ain't broke, fix it till it is.

thanks a lot, every body, i was just trying to learn a bit of scripting. as i said, every time i see `that` i see that is totally obvious what it might produce.
mike, thank you very much, i`ll try that script tonight.