Check If Shell Script $1 Is Absolute Or Relative Path

Question

As the title says, I am trying to determine if my bash script receives a full path or a relative file to a directory as a parameter.

For some reasons the following doesn't seem to work for me:

#!/bin/bash



DIR=$1



if [ "$DIR" = /* ]

then

    echo "absolute"

else

    echo "relative"

fi

When I run my script with either a full path or absolute path it says:

./script.sh: line 5: [: too many arguments

relative

For some reasons I can't seem to figure this bug. Any ideas?

Answer 1

[ ... ] doesn't do pattern matching. /* is being expanded to the contents of /, so effectively you have

if [ "$DIR" = /bin /boot /dev /etc /home /lib /media ... /usr /var ]

or something similar. Use [[ ... ]] instead.

if [[ "$DIR" = /* ]]; then

Check If Shell Script $1 Is Absolute Or Relative Path

Sign up