Hi All, I need to write a script that I will manually start (or a cron job in future) but I need it to do a number of things in order one after another. How do i do that so everything gets dont as the steps depend on each other. Example: cd /system_backups/ tar cvf apache-conf.tar /etc/httpd/conf/* gzip -v9 apache-conf.tar tar cvf apache-data.tar /var/www/* gzip -v9 apache-data.tar then last step... tar cvf <current_date>-system_backup.tar <all> the gzip files above gzip -v9 <current_date>-system_backup.tar scp <current_date>-system_backup.tar.gz user at 10.0.0.1:/. etc...etc.... My questions: 1. How do I execute each statement and make sure subsequent statements are not executed until the previous is done? 2. How do I error check so if a step fails the script stops? 3. Since I run an SMTP Server on this box can I e-mail myself from bash the nightly results? 4. when I want to run the scp to send over the file to another machine for safety, how can I have it know the password to the machine I am scp'ing to? My mind is going crazy sort of with the things that I could do to protect myself in case of a system failure and making restoring easier. Can anyone provide insight for me? -Jason