A little help with a shell script

[chadders]

Hey,

the following shell script executes but does absolutely nothing. It is meant to switch the synaptics touch pad on if it's off or off if it's on. Any ideas? I think it's something to do with the string comparison.

question="`synclient -l | grep TouchpadOff`"

echo $question

if [[ $question == "TouchpadOff = 1" ]]
then

synclient TouchpadOff=0 

else

synclient TouchpadOff=1 

fi

Thanks in advance,

chadders.

[anomie]

Read this:
http://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/sha-bang.html

Also, run your script like so:
bash -x ./script-here

You can watch it as it executes to see which statements are being run, variable assignments, etc.

[chadders]

Help? To me it appears as though a list of characters is being compared to a string (if it's even a string). How can I rectify this?

chadders@laptop:~/Desktop$ bash -x touchpad.sh
++ synclient -l
++ grep TouchpadOff
+ question='    TouchpadOff          = 1'
+ echo TouchpadOff = 1
TouchpadOff = 1
+ [[     TouchpadOff          = 1 == \T\o\u\c\h\p\a\d\O\f\f\ \=\ \1 ]]
+ synclient TouchpadOff=1

[anomie]

Don't forget to add your sha-bang.

I think the problem is with whitespace in the left side of your conditional test. Try this:
[[ $(echo $question | tr -d ' ') == 'TouchpadOff=1' ]]

Squeeze out the spaces so that you can compare easily.

See how helpful that debugger is? You can see the white space in the variable assignment operation.

[chadders]

yup that worked perfectly. Thanks a lot . I'm still new to shell scripting but at least I'm not a complete newbie lol :P