[eNightmare]

I have a problem...
I'm trying to write a bash script to compare $1

I want the first argument to be the "options" eg. script -d

so here is what i tried

if [$1 == -*]

it doesn't seem to give me the results i want. It "should" tell me whether the first character of the first positional parameter is a hyphen, but it doesn't seem to do that.

Does anyone know how to get that working right?

[khiloa]

Mind posting the whole script for us to look over?

[eNightmare]

I guess I could, but its theres not much...
I'm just wondering how I can see if the first positional parameter starts with a hyphen. Its going to the else statement on every occasion with the:

if [$1 == -*]

EDIT: if you really think it will help, i'll post up the script tomorrow.

[Christoph]

ideamagnate@feather:~$ f()
> {
>...if [ $1 == '-d' ]
>...then
>.....echo yup
>...else
>.....echo nope
>...fi
> }
ideamagnate@feather:~$ f -d
yup
ideamagnate@feather:~$ f -e
nope
ideamagnate@feather:~$ f 345
nope
ideamagnate@feather:~$

If you're writing anything longer than about 40-50 lines, I highly recommend The ABS Guide.

[eNightmare]

will the (*) wildcard work there?

[khiloa]

If you put in a wildcard in that example, I believe it would say yup for everything. In what you are doing it may work though.

[Christoph]

'Fraid not. If you use an asterisk, it matches an asterisk. This is one of the areas where bash doesn't shine. If I had to do this in bash, I'd probably do something like:

ideamagnate@feather:~\ 2 $ f()
> if [ "$(echo $1 | grep -- '-.')" != "" ]; > then
>...echo yes
> else
>...echo no
> fi
ideamagnate@feather:~\ 2 $ f -quux
yes
ideamagnate@feather:~\ 2 $ f -d
yes
ideamagnate@feather:~\ 2 $ f -
no
ideamagnate@feather:~\ 2 $ f --
yes
ideamagnate@feather:~\ 2 $ f 42
no

However, it's a total hack, especially since it relies on executing a separate program to get a simple string. If I actually needed to write code that did something like that, I'd rewrite the code in something more elegant like Perl or C or 1's and 0's.

For reference, in Perl it'd be:
if ($1 ~= /-.*/){
which is much more concise and very easy to read if you're used to Perl. If you're not, it looks like something /dev/random sneezed out, but that's how Perl's supposed to be.

[khiloa]

Thats strange; anywho, I think I might be doing some bash programming sometime soon.

[eNightmare]

I think i'm starting to not like bash

[Christoph]

It's got its place. In the same way you wouldn't write an OS kernel in Perl or a MySQL-driven website in C, you wouldn't want to write a script of more than a couple hundred lines in bash. If you're on the CLI and need to do some operation on 500 sequentially named files, it's good to know that you can do it a with a simple bash for loop.