Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi,

Just want to know if anyone can suggest if there is a "better" way of coding the if-then-else block below:

Code:

ZIP=""
if [[ -x "`which compress`" ]] ; then
   ZIP=`which compress`
   echo "ZIP program to use = ${ZIP}"
elif [[ -x "`which gzip`" ]] ; then
   ZIP=`which gzip`
   echo "ZIP program to use = ${ZIP}"
else
   echo "No ZIP binary to use ..."
fi

It is working the way I want it to, but just want to make it look a bit more "elegant" or "professional" may be :-)

The preference is to use compress but on some of the servers, compress does not exist but gzip does.

I believe the above code can be done in a shorthand format using : and ? but I can't remember how I did it before.

Any advise/tips much appreciated. Thanks in advance.

What you have there is easy to read, maintainable code. Harder to read code is not more professional

You could loop it easily enough.

Code:

for X in compress gzip zip
do
        [[ -x `which $X` ]] || continue
        break
done

if [[ -z "$X" ]]
then
        echo "No zip binary" >&2
        exit 1
fi