Shell Programming and Scripting

What do you think would be the simplest test?
Never thought about using ls?
If it displays: "No such file or directory " then you dont cd...

I'm not looking for a way to find a directory, I'm looking for a way to get the full path based on a shell script's working directory and a directory argument sent to the script, into a variable.

The only option I see is testing the user input to the shell to see what you want to do from there. A case/esac structure might work well in this instance. Perhaps coupled with "dirname"

Something like

Code:

 
USERIN=$1 

case "$(dirname $USERIN)" in
  /) echo fully qualified;;
  .) echo relative to current directory;;
  ..) echo relative to parent directory;;
  ../..) echo relative to parent/parent directory;;
...  # < --- replace this
esac

You need to replace the ellipses with one test for each level it can go beyond the script's parent/parent directory back to root.

Obviously you replace the echo statements with code that actually works for you.

dirname seems to know that if you give the name "somewhere" or the name "./somewhere" it will translate that to a single dot "." so that reduces the amount of
tests by one.

And of course after I post that, I realize there's still a host of things that wont work correctly, depending upon input like (../somewhere/else) but maybe this will get you started somewhat? :-)

Looking more and more like homework, and no collaboration ( you havent shown so far anything of your work without paying attention to what is said there...)
So until you can prove it is not, this thread is considered as homework by someone unwilling to learn and closed

---------- Post updated at 18:06 ---------- Previous update was at 18:05 ----------

Sorry rwuerth...