Hi,

I think I can see where you might have gone a little bit wrong here. I assume that when you run:

Code:

grep -q data "$type"

you're attempting to see if the string "data" occurs in the contents of the variable "$type", which will indeed be correctly populated with the output of the file command. However, that's not what grep does. The grep command specifically searches the contents of files, and nothing else.

So what's going wrong here is that grep is trying to search for the string "data" in a file on disk in the current directory called (e.g. in the case of an ASCII file) "test: ASCII text", which does not exist.

If you want to check for the contents of a variable rather than a file, there's a few ways you could do that. Probably one of the easiest changes for you to make in your script would be to do a test like this instead:

Code:

if echo "$type" | grep "data"

This would cause grep to treat sandard input as its file, into which we are piping the output of the echo "$type" command. So this would ultimately check to see if the variable "$type" contained the string "data", which is I think what you're wanting to do.

Hope this helps.