Hi,

I am new to unix and shell scripting.In my script,there is a line using the "if" conditional -

if [$x != "," ] && [$x != ","]; then
do something

Here "x" is a variable holding string value.If it is not equal to a comma or a string,only then I want to enter the "if" loop. But I am getting error while running this. The error says - " != Expecting unary operator" . Please let me know what is wrong and how to correct it.

You should protect your variables with quotes, and also you need spaces around the [ and ] characters, e.g.

if [ "$x" != "a_string" ] && [ "$x" != "," ]; then
    #do something
fi

Please help me.

Thanks a lot Annihilanic. It is working now.

There is one more question. I have a string(suppose $str). If it starts with a comma(there can be more than one comma at the start),I have to remove all the commas from the beginning.So i have to check if the string starts with a comma.If it does,I have to delete all the commas which are at the start of the string.Please help.

root@isau02:/data/tmp/testfeld> echo ",,,weeeeeekend"| sed 's/^,\+//'
weeeeeekend

Thanks for your reply.But what I need is,I want to delete starting commas from the variable (say $str) and the changes should be made to the original variable so that when I access $str the next time,the starting commas are not there.Please help.