On Wed, Feb 21, 2007 at 12:54:35PM +0000, Brett Parker wrote:
On Wed, Feb 21, 2007 at 12:49:13PM +0000, Paul wrote:
On Wednesday 21 February 2007 11:42, Eur Ing Chris Green wrote:
What's the simplest (and/or most concise) way to check for an empty directory?
if test -z `ls foo` ; then wibble ; fi
Or
if [ -z `ls foo` ] ; then wibble ; fi
There's probably other ways....
Just a quick note - in bash, and any real posix shell, it's (generally) better form to use $(command) than `command`, it's more readable and is nestable if needed...
Mr Pashley has a few things to say about backticks, it's worth a quick read if nothing else: http://www.davidpashley.com/blog/programming/shell/backticks.html
Very true (the comments above backticks that is), however:-
At work my development machine is a Solaris system where (on the default shell at least) the $(command) syntax doesn't work. I use a lot of the scripts I develop both at home and at work.
Backticks are still more 'universal', for example backticks work in mutt's configuration file.