[SOLVED] Bash scripts - is installing in this way good practice?

Issue

In my bash script I have the following lines installing various Linux packages on Centos 6.5 - two questions:

• is it good practice to do it this way?

• OR is there a better way maybe using rpms and how would I go about doing that?

  http://packages.sw.be/rpmforge-release/rpmforge-release-0.5.2-2.el6.rf.x86_64.rpm
  yum -y install update nano mlocate bind bind-utils php-mbstring aide psacct screen tmux iperf ipset rsync htop innotop dstat traceroute strace ltrace rkhunter nmap curl curl-devel php-pear php-xml php-devel gcc zlib-devel pcre-devel php zip unzip telnet php-imap vsftpd wget
  yum -y install perl-DateTime-Format-HTTP perl-DateTime-Format-Builder
  yum -y install php-pdo php-gd php-xml
  yum -y install expect
  rpm -Uvh --force ftp://ftp.univie.ac.at/systems/linux/fedora/epel/6/x86_64/perl-BerkeleyDB-0.43-3.el6.x86_64.rpm
  pecl install -f zip
  

Solution

First, things will go faster if you simply combine all your yum commands into a single invocation:

yum -y install nano mlocate bind bind-utils \
  php-mbstring aide psacct screen tmux iperf ipset rsync \
  htop innotop dstat traceroute strace ltrace rkhunter \
  nmap curl curl-devel php-pear php-xml php-devel gcc \
  zlib-devel pcre-devel php zip unzip telnet php-imap \
  vsftpd wget perl-DateTime-Format-HTTP \
  perl-DateTime-Format-Builder php-pdo php-gd php-xml \
  expect

This way yum only needs to calculate dependencies once.

When installing an RPM from a remote server, you can also use yum:

yum -y install ftp://ftp.univie.ac.at/systems/linux/fedora/epel/6/x86_64/perl-BerkeleyDB-0.43-3.el6.x86_64.rpm

This will ensure that any dependencies of the package are installed as well.

Answered By - larsks

Answer Checked By - David Goodson (WPSolving Volunteer)