How do i check if all parameters are set in bash?

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hi,

I have 4 parameters passed to my shell and i validate if all four are entered using the following snippet:

if [ $# -ne 4 ]
then echo "Not entered" 
else echo "entered"
fi

I get the following output as 'Not entered even when i enter the values for all prompts.
Please advise.

Thanks.

2

Does any one or more parameter have a whitespace in it not contained inside quotes?

If so perhaps this is the reason. Without much more info like:-

1) OS in use.
2) Shell version in use.
3) A little more of your code to give us more insight as to what is going on.
4) Anything else that might be useful.

We can't give you much more help.

3

here is the full code snippet:

USERNAME="$1"
export USERNAME
REMOTE_SERVER="$2"
export REMOTE_SERVER
LOCAL_DIRECTORY="$3"
export LOCAL_DIRECTORY
REMOTE_DIRECTORY="$4"
export REMOTE_DIRECTORY
DIRECTION="$5"
export DIRECTION
LOG_FILEPATH="$6"
export LOG_FILEPATH
LOG_FILENAME="$7"
export LOG_FILENAME
BIN_PATH="$8"
export BIN_PATH
LOCAL_JOBNAME="$9"
export LOCAL_JOBNAME
REMOTE_JOBNAME="$10"
export REMOTE_JOBNAME

##Validating if all inputs were entered
echo "Entering the program `date`" 																				
if [ $# -ne 10 ]
then
echo "One or more inputs to this program were not entered." 													
echo "Please verify the Appworx module" 																		
echo "Aborting the program on `date`"																			
exit 1
else
echo "All inputs to this program have been entered" 															
fi
4

Hi,

You did not write what are the command line arguments given to the script.

Here is the sample run for your code:

$ cat try.sh
#!/bin/bash

if [ $# -ne 4 ]; then
       echo "not entered 4 cmd args"
else
 echo "Good"
fi

Output:

$ ./try.sh 123 345 345 56
Good

$ ./try.sh 123 345 345
not entered 4 cmd args

$ ./try.sh "123 345 345"
not entered 4 cmd args
5

As greet_sed and I have both pointed out, does any one or more of these paramters have whitespaces
in them without quotes or NULL values?

Possible ones are:-

USERNAME="$1"
LOCAL_DIRECTORY="$3"
REMOTE_DIRECTORY="$4"
LOG_FILEPATH="$6"
LOG_FILENAME="$7"
BIN_PATH="$8"
LOCAL_JOBNAME="$9"
REMOTE_JOBNAME="$10"

Example longhand OSX 10.7.5 default bash terminal:-

Last login: Wed Sep  7 20:38:15 on ttys000
AMIGA:barrywalker~> test()
> {
> echo $#
> }
AMIGA:barrywalker~> test "Hello World everybody"
1
AMIGA:barrywalker~> test Hello World everybody
3
AMIGA:barrywalker~>
6

With this code, you would reject the input with "Not entered", if the caller supplied MORE than 4 parameters. This is at least a confusing error message. Here is how I would write it in bash:

if (( $# < 4 ))
then
  echo Only $# parameters supplied, 4 expected
elif (( $# > 4 ))
then
  echo You entered $(( $# - 4 )) 'parameter(s)' too many
fi

This would also help tracking down the error.