[AgentWalker]

Hi all go easy on me as im still getting the hang of this

iv got a script that will bundle a few files together. to run it you enter somthing like this

bundle house home light > newfile

this will put the 3 files "house home light" together in the newfile.

Ic got it doing that but now need to add some error checking.

im trying to make the script detect if the user tries to add a "/" character in any of the parameters and if so output an error message.

how would i go about checking the parameters to see if they contain the '/' character ?

thanx all for your help

[Squashman]

But what if you wanted to merge files together from different directories at the same time. Wouldn't that be useful as well. If you checked for that to cause an error you would not be able to do that.

[deuce868]

this might be a good place to start

http://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/regexp.html

[codejockey]

One way (and far from the only way) to do this would be to echo each filename to be added to the "bundle" and pipe the output to grep/egrep/fgrep to search for the "/" character. If the output is non-NULL, the filename contains one or more "/" characters. If the output is NULL, the filename does not contain "/" characters.

Since you don't mention the scripting language you're using, I've assumed bash-compatible. Examples:

echo "/usr/bin/ls" | egrep "/" (produces /usr/bin/ls)
echo "holy regular expression Batman" | egrep "/" (produces no output)

The return codes from the two examples are also different -- another way to test the result.

Hope this helps.