if arguments is equal to this string define a variable like this string

Question

I am doing some bash script and now I got one variable call source and one array called samples  like this   source  country  samples  US Canada Mexico       as I want to expand the number of sources  and each source has its own samples  I tried to add some arguments to do this  I tried this   source    samples      if    1  country     then    source  country     samples  US Canada Mexico     else    echo  try again  fi   but when I ran my script source countries sh country it didn t work  What am I doing wrong

User · Answer

You can use either     or      operators for string comparison in bash   The important factor is the spacing within the brackets   The proper method is for brackets to contain spacing within  and operators to contain spacing around   In some instances different combinations work  however  the following is intended to be a universal example   if     1      something     then        GOOD  if     1     something     then         GOOD  if     1   something     then           BAD  operator spacing   if    1      something    then          BAD  bracket spacing    Also  note double brackets are handled slightly differently compared to single brackets      if     a    z      then     True if  a starts with a  z   pattern matching   if     a     z       then   True if  a is equal to z   literal matching    if    a    z     then       File globbing and word splitting take place  if     a      z      then   True if  a is equal to z   literal matching     I hope that helps

User · Answer

It seems that you are looking to parse commandline arguments into your bash script  I have searched for this recently myself  I came across the following which I think will assist you in parsing the arguments   http   rsalveti wordpress com 2007 04 03 bash-parsing-arguments-with-getopts   I added the snippet below as a tl dr   using   after a switch variable means it requires some input  ie  t  requires something after t to validate while h requires nothing  while getopts    ht r p v    OPTION do      case  OPTION in          h               usage              exit 1                          t               TEST  OPTARG                          r               SERVER  OPTARG                          p               PASSWD  OPTARG                          v               VERBOSE 1                                          usage              exit                      esac done  if    -z  TEST          -z  SERVER          -z  PASSWD    then      usage      exit 1 fi     script sh -t test -r server -p password -v

User · Answer

Don t forget about spaces   source    samples      if    1    country     then    source  country     samples  US Canada Mexico     else   echo  try again  fi

[bash] if arguments is equal to this string, define a variable like this string

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