Comments on: Interesting Shell Script Problem [Solved]

By: DoC

DoC — Fri, 13 May 2005 16:22:06 +0000

I win! \o/

By: Cliph

Cliph — Fri, 13 May 2005 15:40:01 +0000

I tried yours and it didn’t work, for me at least. Good effort though.

Thanks to everyone who replied.

By: johnke

johnke — Fri, 13 May 2005 15:38:13 +0000

Surely I should get some points for elegance and lack of disruption to your original script? :(

By: Cliph

Cliph — Fri, 13 May 2005 15:35:15 +0000

DoC wins for the first working solution and an explaination.

Learning is fun.

By: johnke

johnke — Fri, 13 May 2005 15:30:25 +0000

if grep -vq ” $user ” $GROUPFILE
then

… seems to work for me (ubuntu hoary).

By: DoC

DoC — Fri, 13 May 2005 15:29:00 +0000

On the other hand, I don’t think that grep will actually return a 1 or 0 in your script. backticks return the output from a statement, not the return value. So, you’re NOTing nothing (i.e. 0) which evaluates to true.

Do the grep in a statement before your if, then use the if to test the value of $?

grep -w $user $GROUPFILE
if [ ! $? == “1″]
etc