Hi, I'm trying to prompt the user to supply a path name to a file. Once I read the pathname to a variable in the script, I need to check whether the directory exist or not. If not , then I need to ask the user for reentering the path. Can anyone show me how to accomplish this ? Thanks in advance, abby

Do a man on 'test'. You'll see that there are numerous flags for testing things like the existence of a directory, a file, a non-zero size file, etc. This code will loop until a valid path is entered. I'd suggest modifying it to contain a counter, so that it'll exit after 3 failures or somesuch. validPath=0 while [ $validPath -eq 0 ] do echo echo Please enter the path read myPath if [ -d $myPath ] then validPath=1 else echo Sorry, that path is invalid fi done echo echo $myPath is valid ~

Just make it a function Best to make it a function so you can call on it at anytime #!/bin/ksh function chkdirectory { read getdirectory"?Give me Directory> " if [[ -d $getdirectory ]];then echo Directory is there! else echo Bad Directory chkdirectory fi } chkdirectory