Freitag, 10. Februar 2012

Bash if statement

The Bash if statement is a bit funny. Say for every files-i.txt, there should be a files-i.dat.
This example can be used to filter out files that dont have the corresponding .dat file present.


for i in files-*txt
do
if [ ! -e ${i/txt/dat} ]
then
echo $i
fi
done


Note the spaces after and before the opening and closing hard bracket. Also note that "then" is on its own line.

2 Kommentare:

  1. Strange criticism.

    `if' simply looks for a 0 or a 1 as the output of *any* command. In bash, [ ... ] is "syntactic sugar" for `test', e.g. `if test ! -e file.dat'. In other words, the [ ... ] isn't necessarily part of `if'.

    And you also don't need to put `then' on it's own line. You can separate the `if test' from then with a semicolon, e.g. `if /bin/true ; then echo TRUE ; fi '.

    Sorry for posting on an old post. Catching up in my feed reader.

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    1. Appreciate it. Am I to understand that the space between the semi-colons is required? On both sides?

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