Batch scripting error after Linux conversion

[ChronoLegion]

Hello,

We are in the process of converting from HP Unix to Linux (bash), and one of our shell scripts is giving an error on the first line of the code below.

if [ ! -f ${FILENAM}* ]

then
 error_out "${FILENAM} is not found" 1 $LINENO
fi

Where FILENAM is the first script parameter.

Here is the error we're getting:

line 42: [: too many arguments

Do you know how the if-clause needs to be rewritten to avoid the error? I tried searching online, but have not found a satisfactory solution.

Thank you,
Art

[Kloschüssel]

if [ ! -f ${FILENAM}* ];
then
 error_out "${FILENAM} is not found" 1 $LINENO
fi

Cheers

[Cabhan]

It looks to me like Kloscussel's solution simply adds a semicolon to the end of your if statement. I do not believe that is the problem.

The problem is that you are using a glob in the if. Let us imagine that $FILENAM contains the value "foo". If you are running this script in a directory that contains files "foo", "foobar", and "foobaz", then this line:

if [ ! -f ${FILENAM}* ]

gets expanded by Bash into:

if [ ! -f foo foobar foobaz ]

And this is invalid Bash code, because "-f" can only check a single file.

I don't know what you're trying to do here, but if $FILENAM contains the exact file and should not be globbed, you can just do this:

if [ ! -f "$FILENAM" ]

[Kloschüssel]

Oh. Looks like I did not read the first message long enough to see the error, sorry.

If it would have to be really a <file>*, then something like this should work around the symptom:

for i in ${FILENAM}*;
do
  if [ ! -f  "$i" ];
  then
    error_out "$i is not found" 1 $LINENO
  fi
done;

Cheers

[ChronoLegion]

That worked! Thanks a lot!