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Top Forums Shell Programming and Scripting Checking the existance of multiple files Post 302462464 by Scrutinizer on Thursday 14th of October 2010 10:23:15 AM
Old 10-14-2010
This says more:
Quote:
An early proposal used the KornShell -a primary (with the same meaning), but this was changed to -e because there were concerns about the high probability of humans confusing the -a primary with the -a binary operator.
The Open Group Base Specifications Issue 7

Additional information on the differences:
sh-posix(1)

posix shell was largely derived from ksh88, so while ksh88 is not fully compliant, but I think there are not many differences and ksh88 is largely a superset, but obviously not completely and less than I thought.
Quote:
Originally Posted by methyl
Footnote: ksh88 is definitely not Posix compliant. Many standards have come and gone (including past failed Posix standards) since ksh88 was released. I find ksh88 to be pretty standard across multiple platforms of multiple vintages and continue to wait for a viable replacement cross-platform standard.
So I found out Smilie. This is even wrong in O'Reilly's learning the Korn Shell
About the cross-platformness: If you are willing to give up goodies like arrays, then you could use posix standard and use the posix implementations on the various platforms (/bin/sh on hpux, /usr/xpg4/bin/sh on Solaris).. At least then your scripts will work on modern implementations too). You could also standardize on ksh93 (which is available as /bin/ksh93 or /usr/dt/bin/dtksh), which is also fully POSIX compliant (and is free downloadable software anyway nowadays).

S.

---------- Post updated at 16:23 ---------- Previous update was at 15:54 ----------

So in the case of a POSIX-compliant shell you can use:

Code:
exists()
{ 
  [ -e "$1" ]
}

in case of original version of ksh88:
Code:
exists()
{ 
  [ -a "$1" ]
}

If you want to only test for a regular file (and not a directory for example) you could do something like this:
Code:
file_exists(){
  until [ -f "$1" ] ; do
    [ $# -le 1 ] && return 1
    shift
  done
}

 

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shells(4)							   File Formats 							 shells(4)

NAME
shells - shell database SYNOPSIS
/etc/shells DESCRIPTION
The shells file contains a list of the shells on the system. Applications use this file to determine whether a shell is valid. See getuser- shell(3C). For each shell a single line should be present, consisting of the shell's path, relative to root. A hash mark (#) indicates the beginning of a comment; subsequent characters up to the end of the line are not interpreted by the routines which search the file. Blank lines are also ignored. The following default shells are used by utilities: /bin/bash, /bin/csh, /bin/jsh, /bin/ksh, /bin/ksh93, /bin/pfcsh, /bin/pfksh, /bin/pfsh, /bin/sh, /bin/tcsh, /bin/zsh, /sbin/jsh, /sbin/sh, /usr/bin/bash, /usr/bin/csh, /usr/bin/jsh, /usr/bin/ksh, /usr/bin/ksh93, /usr/bin/pfcsh, /usr/bin/pfksh, /usr/bin/pfsh, and /usr/bin/sh, /usr/bin/tcsh, /usr/bin/zsh, and /usr/sfw/bin/zsh. /etc/shells overrides the default list. Invalid shells in /etc/shells could cause unexpected behavior, such as being unable to log in by way of ftp(1). FILES
/etc/shells list of shells on system SEE ALSO
vipw(1B), ftpd(1M), sendmail(1M), getusershell(3C), aliases(4) SunOS 5.11 20 Nov 2007 shells(4)
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