Looking for a little help parsing some command line arguments in a bash script I am working on, this is probably fairly basic to most, but I do not have much experience with it.
At the command line, when the script is run, I need to make sure the argument passed is a file, it exists in the current directory, and that there is only one argument.
Here is the code I am using for this task now, but it does not produce the result I need:
if [ -f $1 -a $# -eq 1 ]
Thanks!
what is the message your are getting?
Have you echo'ed the values before the "if" ?
Posix-sh, ksh, bash, ...
[ $# -lt 1 ] && echo "need arg" && exit 1
[ ! -f "$1" ] && echo "file $1 must exist" && exit 1
Your version [ -f $1 -a $# -eq 1 ] give error if you don't give any arguments, because $1 is empty, but if you put -f "$1" then value is some string, maybe very short (len 0).
Why ? Read full story
!/bin/bash -x
returns:
+ '[' -f filename -a 1 -eq 1 ']'
++ cut -d: -f3
++ sort -r
++ head -n1
---------- Post updated at 06:00 PM ---------- Previous update was at 05:08 PM ----------
ahhhh, thanks guys, I figured it out, problem was elsewhere.