pludi: thanks for the quick reply. I actually wrote this originally for my Intro to Unix class, where I needed somewhere to stick temporary files I was working on/looking at, that I didn't want to worry about remembering to clean up. In that class we use FreeBSD. I fixed the errors you mentioned, thank you for the advice.

This is what my code looks like now:

Code:

# if files exist, remove contents of purge directory
purgeTest=`ls -lA ~/purge`
if [$purgeTest!="total 0"]; then
rm -r ~/purge/*
fi

Thisi is the error I get:

Code:

bash: [total: command not found