Bash conditionals: how to "and" expressions? (if [ ! -z $VAR && -e $VAR ])
if [ ! -z "$var" ] && [ -e "$var" ]; then
# something ...
fi
From the bash
manpage:
[[ expression ]]
- return a status of 0 or 1 depending on the evaluation of the conditional expression expression.
And, for expressions, one of the options is:
expression1 && expression2
- true if bothexpression1
andexpression2
are true.
So you can and
them together as follows (-n
is the opposite of -z
so we can get rid of the !
):
if [[ -n "$var" && -e "$var" ]] ; then
echo "'$var' is non-empty and the file exists"
fi
However, I don't think it's needed in this case, -e xyzzy
is true if the xyzzy
file exists and can quite easily handle empty strings. If that's what you want then you don't actually need the -z
non-empty check:
pax> VAR=xyzzy
pax> if [[ -e $VAR ]] ; then echo yes ; fi
pax> VAR=/tmp
pax> if [[ -e $VAR ]] ; then echo yes ; fi
yes
In other words, just use:
if [[ -e "$var" ]] ; then
echo "'$var' exists"
fi
if [ -n "$var" -a -e "$var" ]; then
do something ...
fi