CODEWITHSUNDEEP
bash
dss
dss

Reputation: 71

Trying to find the exact word in the command line arguments using bash script

I am accepting user input and want the script to work for below cases. I have tried using '==' and '=~'. However my script works well for the second case when I use '==' but first one fails. When I use the '=~' instead the script accepts arguments like ./script john harryyy smith.. which I don't want it to accept. Any best way to get both cases working?

  1. ./script john harry smith
  2. ./script john
if [[ "${args[@]}" == "john" ]]; then
....
else
....

Upvotes: 0

Views: 80

Answers (2)

dss
dss

Reputation: 71

I think i would use case statement something like this .. this is not exact code. This seems to work as i am particularly looking for a string like 'john'

case ${args[i]} in 'harry'|'smith'|.....) ..... ...... ;;

    'john')
     .....
     .......
      ;;

    *)

Upvotes: 0

Guest
Guest

Reputation: 124

You could use grep, and then wc to count the grep matches.

if [[ "$(echo ${args[@]} | grep "john" | wc -l) -ge 0 ]]; then ...; else...; fi

For user input, I'd recommend using grep -i, to make the grep search case insensitive.

Edit:

Didn't fully read the whole question, so my bad there. The above will still match harry to harryyy. For matching multiple arguments to multiple variables, I would probably use for loops.

for ((i=0;i<${#args[@]};i++)); do
    if [ ${args[$i]} = "john" ]; then
        ...
        break #optional, prevents the code from executing twice if the user has typed two "john"s.
    fi
done

Of couse, you'd have to have a loop for each name you wanted to check. If you put the names into an array as well, you could double-loop instead;

#array names contains the names to check against.
for ((i=0;i<${#names[@]};i++)); do
    for ((ii=0;ii<${#args[@]};ii++)); do
        if [ ${args[$ii]} = ${names[$i]} ]; then
            ...
            continue 2 #again, optional, continues the first loop for the same reason as above
        fi
    done
done

Upvotes: 1

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