No display of variable data on mail output - Shell scripting

Question

I've scheduled a task in a UNIX environment, which sends a report of services running/stopped using Shell scripting. Here is the code for same;

#!/bin/bash
echo -e "\t\tServer daily monitoring report\n">/home/user/MailLog.txt
echo -e "\t\t`date "+%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S"`\n">>/home/user/MailLog.txt
sudo bash /home/user/commands.sh>>/home/user/MailLog.txt
echo >>/home/user/MailLog.txt
cat /home/user/MailLog.txt>>/home/user/StatusLog.txt
rn=`grep -c "running" MailLog.txt`
sp=`grep -c "stopped" MailLog.txt`
echo -e "Server status report\n\nServices running:\t $rn \nServices 
stopped:\t $sp "|mailx -v -s "Services report." -a /home/user/MailLog.txt 
useremail1@domain.com,useremail2@domain.com
#echo $run $stp
#rm /home/user/MailLog.txt

As per scheduled task, I receive the mail and attachment alright. But I get a blank in front of 'Services running: ' and 'Services stopped: '.

When I manually run the script, I get the proper output (numbers + attachment).

Please tell me what I'm doing wrong.

Answer 1

Replace MailLog.txt by /home/user/MailLog.txt in both grep commands. It's very likely that you usually manually run the commands from the /home/user/ directory but the script's working directory isn't /home/user , which makes the relative path MailLog.txt point to an inexistant file.

rn=$(grep -c "running" /home/user/MailLog.txt)
sp=$(grep -c "stopped" /home/user/MailLog.txt)

Better yet, set the file path in a variable and reuse that one each time you want to refer to the file :

work_file="/home/user/MailLog.txt"
#[...]
rn=$(grep -c "running" "$work_file")
sp=$(grep -c "stopped" "$work_file")

Note that your code could be improved in many other ways, I suggest you validate it with shellcheck (you can ignore the sudo+redirect warning since your user has write permissions to the MailLog.txt file).