CODEWITHSUNDEEP
linuxbashshellsh
Jaro
Jaro

Reputation: 117

Linux bash: destination directory given by user, stored in a variable

I am required to create a script in linux bash, where at some point the user can enter a path to a directory. For this I should use read -p command. Then I should check if directory exists. My code below works fine until the user tries to enter ~/path. The code does not recognize symbol ~ as Home directory. Any suggestions?

read -p "Please, enter the destination: "
    if [ -d "$REPLY" ]; then
        echo "Directory exists!"
    fi

Upvotes: 1

Views: 205

Answers (2)

Etan Reisner
Etan Reisner

Reputation: 80931

In general you should avoid (and encourage people to avoid) using ~ expansion except directly at the shell prompt.

That said if you do have to deal with it and want to support all of the various extended bash tilde expansions you can use something like my tildeExpand.sh script.

Upvotes: 1

geirha
geirha

Reputation: 6181

You'll have to replace ~ with "$HOME" yourself. There are also other types of tilde expansion, which you generally use less often, such as ~user to get user's homedir instead of your own. Assuming you only care about the first case, then a parameter expansion will do

read -ep 'Please, enter the destination: ' dir
dir=${dir/#~/$HOME}
if [[ -d $dir ]]; then
    printf 'Good job, the directory exists!\n'
fi

You might notice I added -e to the read command. This makes read use the readline library to read in the directory. That means the user may use tab-completion.

See BashFAQ 100 for more on string manipulations in bash.

Upvotes: 4

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