Hello Everyone, I am a total beginner in UNIX and have to write this huge shell script in bash shell. The script is to create a spellingchecking program. First, script needs to check if file entered by user exists in parent or current directory (both). I have an idea but not sure if it is right: Can someone please help: if [ -f $filename ] echo "File exists" Can someone please tell me how do I check it in both current directory and parent directory? I will really appreciate any or all input. Thanks.

This works if the HOME shell variable is set: #!/bin/bash filename=myfile if [[ -f "$filename" ]] then echo "File exists" fi if [[ -f "$HOME/$filename" ]] then echo "File exists in HOME directory" fi

Thank you so much for your help. I was coming up with something, would you advice if this would be correct in Bash shell. if [ -f ./$filename ] || [ -f ../$filename ]; then echo "file exists. else echo"Input correct name" fi Thanks again. What I need to add here is a for loop that will keep on asking the user to input the filename until it is correct...say 5 times. Could someone tell me how to do it or look at what i did and correct it: for ((x=1; x<=5; x++) do if [ -f ./$filename ] || [ -f ../$filename ]; then echo "file exists. else echo"Input correct name" fi done Any help here will be appreciated. Thanks.

Here is a way using a while loop: #!/bin/bash filename=init cnt=0 while true do if [[ -f "$filename" || -f ../"$filename" ]] then echo "File exists" break else echo "Input file name " fi read filename ((cnt+=1)) if [[ $cnt -eq 5 ]] then echo "exceeded 5 tries. quitting" exit fi done echo "continue"

Thank you again for your response. It helps to have a direction. However, when I tried it, it does not seem to work correctly. Once I input wrong filename, get the error message and start to enter correct filename, but loop still continues on for five times. Inother words, even if I input correct filename, it is not taking that input but simply displaying "Input file name " five times and then quits. Any thoughts or input will be appreciated. Thanks.

I've checked the code I posted and it works fine. I'm running the bash shell on a Solaris 9 system with no problem. Based on your description it looks like the read command is being ignored. Tonight, I'll try it on my Ubuntu Linux system and see what happens. What OS are you running?

Hello, I am using bash shell on solaris 10. Just in case I may have confused you, it does let me input the file name but does not do anything, simply types the statement "input filename" - repeats process three times and exits. Please help. Thank you very much.