My first Bash script : trouble with * 3353

"Vincent Schmid"

Simply

SOURCEPATH=-home-source

will do

Although, by convention, all caps is reserved for environment variables, so something like this would be better:

SOURCEPATH

or

SourcePath

Try this at the commandline:

set

If the list is too long, do:

set less

Test is also in bash. And it expects a single argument, not the list of files that bash will return when it expands "*".

Try this at the commandline:

echo *

and

help

var=$(findhome-source -maxdepth 1 ! -name ".*" wc -l sed 's-^ *--')

find will list the files (including directories, which are also files) but not any "." ("invisible") files and not the contents of the subdirectories; the output of find is piped to wc -l will count the number of lines in find's output, one file per line; this figure is piped to sed to clean up the leading spaces that wc outputs.

The "$( )" means to echo the output of whatever command(s) is inside them. "` `" does the same thing (backticks).

If you wish to list just regular files, put "type -f" afterhome-source. If you want to list all the files in the subdirectories (if any), remove the "-maxdepth 1". If you want to list the "." files, then remove the "! -name ".*".

(You'll find the "." files with ls -a.)

If you use ls instead of find, the number will be one over the number of files and dirs.

if -z "$var" then #commands here, one per line fi

If the content of $var is an empty string, do something.

Which seems to be what you are getting at.

I think I see a windoze-dos programmer that has finally come to his senses and is learning nix. Good for you.

AC

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