Shell Programming and Scripting

the problem is detecting that $word is equal to the '*' char

thanks very much Vino

if i could just detect the '*', i can just not write it out to the output-file
to make matters easier.

the following code does.....
- accepts a document (text), scans through it word for word,
- finds out if the current word is in the stoplist
- if it exists, ignore word, otherwise write it to a file w/ same
- basename as original file.

Problem: the if [ "$word" = "\*" ]; then block cant recognize a single '*'
that occurs in the document. i want the code to be able to ignore '*'
characters occurring by themselves, i.e. surrounded by whitespaces..

When this code is run with a text file, it completely ignores the test for '*'
chars, and continues to the other if block and echoes '*' to the outfile.
the result of echoing '*' prints all the filenames in the current directory
in the outfile.

something is definitely wrong with testing for the '*'..... help guys! Thanks a bunch!

Code:

#!/bin/bash

DOC="$1"
STOPLIST="stopwords.list"
BASENAME=`basename $DOC`

# Scan through the document
for word in `cat $DOC`
do

        # skip '*'
        if [ "$word" = "\*" ]; then
                continue
        fi

        # Look-up current word in stop list
        /usr/xpg4/bin/grep -q -w "$word" $STOPLIST

        # if word is not in stoplist, write it
        if [ $? = 1 ]; then
                echo "$word " >> $BASENAME.stop
        fi
done

How about this ?

Code:

#! /bin/sh
# 
while read line
do
        # Test a line which contains only *
        if [[ "$line" == "*" ]] ; then
        echo "Only $line"
        # Test a line containing characters along with a *
        elif [[ "$line" == *"*"* ]] ; then
                echo "Contains * - $line"
        fi ;
done < input.txt

vino

Rules say

(4) Do not 'bump up' questions if they are not answered promptly. No duplicate or cross-posting and do not report a post where your goal is to get an answer more quickly.


Duplicate post --> bash script help: escaping the '*'

Did you check the solution provided ?

Note: I have merged the threads -- Perderabo

sorry. yup i did..unfortunately none of them worked to help the situation..

Even this ?