How can I check if a variable is empty or not in tcsh Shell?
You can try this (found here):
set name
if ( ${%name} == 0 ) then
echo " Variable name has 0 characters as value."
endif
Note that the person who posted this has the following signature:
Standard advice: avoid csh family for scripting.
Note: This will break if name is an environment variable.
setenv name foobar ; set name ; echo '+++'$name'+++' ; unset name ; echo '==='$name'==='
++++++
===foobar===
The standard warnings regarding use of tcsh
/csh
apply (don't use it for scripting, due to its inherent limitations), but here's the translation:
if ( "$1" == "" ) then # parentheses not strictly needed in this simple case
echo "variable is empty"
else
echo "variable contains $1"
endif
Note, though, that if you were to use an arbitrary variable name rather than $1
in the above, the statement would break if that variable weren't defined yet (whereas $1
is always defined, even if unset).
To plan for the case where a variable, say $var
, may not be defined, it gets tricky:
if (! $?var) then
echo "variable is undefined"
else
if ("$var" == "") then
echo "variable is empty"
else
echo "variable contains $var"
endif
endif
The nested if
s are required to avoid breaking the script, as tcsh
apparently doesn't short-circuit (an else if
branch's conditional will get evaluated even if the if
branch is entered; similarly, both sides of &&
and ||
expressions are seemingly always evaluated - this applies at least with respect to use of undefined variables).