Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi,

Here's my requirement...

There's a SFTP script with batchmode which logs in to the remote site and list all .done files to pick real files (see the following snippet)

Code:

 
echo "-ls $FTP_PATH/*.done" > temp_file
fileNames=`sftp -b temp_file $user@$ip`
isDoneFile=`echo $fileNames | sed -e "s|sftp>||g" -e "s|-ls||g" -e "s|$FTP_PATH/\*.done||g"`

Now the problem arrives I want to create a dummy file when FTP doesn't encounter .done files at remote site. In that scenario the variable fileNames will contain 'sftp> -ls /path/to/the/remote/files/*.done sftp>' value only (otherwise it would have this line and remote filenames with the path). So I replaced those things to blank using sed and did the following check

Code:

 
if [[ -z $isDoneFile ]];then
   echo "No .done files"
else
   echo ".done files are available"
fi

but even when there were no .done files it always echoed ".done files are available" because $isDoneFile had whitespaces!!

I noticed several threads regarding this here; one of them is
https://www.unix.com/shell-programmin...eld-blank.html
but not sure how to use this for my purpose? ( this could seem silly to you but any suggestions would be really helpful to me )

-dips

You code is hard to read with pipes as sed delimiters. pipes have a special meaning in shell scripts.

Code:

echo "$isDoneFile" | read tmp   # this removes leading/trailing tab and space characters
if [[ -z "$tmp" ] ; then
   echo "done"
else
   echo "not done"
fi

Thanks jim! as expected it worked.
-dips