Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi,

I am new to shell scripting, please help me out....

I need to verify that a folder exists (would be in a different location of every computer), and if it exists, I would need to copy files to this folder. My problem is that I don't know how to "get" the returned value.

For example, if I do a find command:

find $FILENAME -name some_file

I would either get an output of $FILENAME/some_file, or nothing is returned

I don't know how to "get" this returned value so that I can copy files to this folder. Also, is there a better command to use than find because some computer can have alot of files in their folders and find would take time.

Thank you very much for your help!

I don't really understand your question. If you don't know the exact location of a directory, you nned to go look for it and that is destined to take time. To check for the existence of a directory, you can do:

if [ -d $directory ] ; then
echo $directory exists
fi

To capture the output of the find command:
var=`find ....`

You can check the availablity of directory as,

if [[ -d <directory> ]]
then
action1
fi

To check the file availablity then use if [[ -f <filename> ]]; then action2; fi

You can use $? to get return value of shell command as,

if [[ -d <directory> ]]
then

find <directory> -name <filename> | grep -q '<filename>'
if [[ $? -eq 0 ]]
then
echo "<filename> exists"
else
echo "<filename> is not existing"
fi
fi

HTH

Thank you very much for your help...that is exactly what I needed.