[oldshep]

I'm new to scripting:

The script below works fine:

#!/bin/sh
echo "Hello World"
if [ "$1" ]
then
echo "arg passed was $1"
else
echo "no arg passed"
fi

The following script does not work:

#!/bin/sh
if [ "$1" ]
then
echo " argument recieved value is: $1"
#case $1 in
# [a-z]*) echo "name starts with a letter";;
# [0-9]*) echo "name starts with a number";;
# *) echo "name starts with invalid character";;
#esac
else
echo " This script requires a student name"
fi

If from prompt: scriptname

get the message::bash interpreter: no such file or directory

If from prompt: ./scriptname

get the message::bash interpreter: no such file or directory

If from prompt: sh scriptname

get the message::sciriptname:line2 [:missing ']'


Anyone What's the probelem?

[lynch]

For one thing, it looks like you need to uncomment(#) lines in the case construct:

 #case $1 in
# [a-z]*) echo "name starts with a letter";;
# [0-9]*) echo "name starts with a number";;
# *) echo "name starts with invalid character";;
#esac

lynch

[oldshep]

the reason the case constuct was commented out was to isolate that bit of coding. The shell then looks the same as the one that workrd OK but this one stil ldid not work...that's my problem

[Squashman]

You need to test whether or not there is variable be passed from the shell prompt.

I think this is what you need to do.

#!/bin/sh
if [ -z "$1" ]
then
       echo " This script requires a student name"
       exit 1
else
    echo " argument recieved value is: $1" 
case $1 in
[a-z]*) echo "name starts with a letter";;
[0-9]*) echo "name starts with a number";;
*) echo "name starts with invalid character";;
esac
fi

I am not sure if this is quite correct. CodeJockey will be along sometime this week to clean up my code. I have not tested this. I dont think that case statement is going to work either.

[codejockey]

I suspect that spacing is your problem (as incredible as that sounds!). When you use the '[' and ']' symbols, you are actually using a shorthand form of the 'test' command, and you must use a blank character both before and after either '[' or ']' symbol. So, for example, the following is fine:

if [ "$1" ]
then
    echo $1 has the value $1
fi

but the following is not fine:

if [ "$1"]     # note the missing space after the second quote
then
    echo $1 has the value $1
fi

Hope this helps.