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I'm writing a script which will have some arguments and so I am using getopts but i want to solve the problem with one argument.

I use a switch, for example -d, and I want the argument for -d will be the path to a directory, like ./work.

I want to test the user's input for a string or path, not a number. Is there any solution to solve this problem? I want to solve it with something like:

If (test)
  then echo it is string
else 
  echo it is not string
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A number is a valid directory name. I would not do any such check. –  John Kugelman Nov 12 '13 at 0:21
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1 Answer

up vote 1 down vote

Every variable is a string.

If you want to distinguish “is a number” from “is not a number”, test that.

while getopts d: OPTLET; do
  case "$OPTLET" in
    d)
      case "$OPTARG" in
        *[!0-9]*) echo 1>&2 "Non-numeric argument to -d, stopping."; exit 2;;
        *) number_of_foo=$OPTARG;;
      esac;;
  esac
done

It isn't clear from your question whether this is what you really want. A number is a string. 123 is a valid file name. So if the argument to -d is supposed to be a potential file name, there is no validation to do. Any sequence of characters is a potentially valid file name.

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The only caveats to the valid file name is that the slash character can only be used as a directory separator, not part of a file name, and NUL (aka \0) can't be part of any path or file name. Handling arbitrary paths is difficult. –  l0b0 Nov 12 '13 at 10:51
    
@l0b0 Right, a pathname can contain any byte except NUL (including / at arbitrary positions) while a filename can contain any character except / and NUL. There are very few contexts where a command line argument would have to be a filename (sans directory) rather than a pathname. –  Gilles Nov 12 '13 at 13:58
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