I am trying to validate multiple inputs separated by spaces(two disk names in the below case) with a shell script. But, I am un-successful in doing so. Can someone help me?
read DISK
if [ "${1}" = "" ] || [ "${2}" = "" ]
then
printf "The Disk pairs cannot be left blank. Exiting script!!!"
exit 1
else
TMP=$DISK
printf "The disks entered are $TMP"
fi
For ksh93, you can use
read -A disks
if [[ ${#disks[@]} -ne 2 ]]; then
print -u2 "You need to enter 2 disks"
exit 1
else
print "You entered: ${disks[*]}"
fi
For ksh88, use the positional parameters
read disks
set -- $disks
if [[ $# -ne 2 ]]; then
print -u2 "You need to enter 2 disks"
exit 1
else
print "You entered: $disks"
fi
set, with no other ±options, sets the positional parameters to the values you provide. So now, $1 is the first word, $2 is the second word, etc.The variables ${1} and ${2} are the commandline parameters and are unrelated to the last read command. There are different ways to use the DISK variable.
Once you have the DISK variable read, I would have chosen for a solution like
echo "${DISK}" | while read disk1 disk2 otherfields; do
echo "disk1=${disk1}, disk2=${disk2}"
done
# or better
disk1="${DISK% *}"; echo "${disk1}"
disk2="${DISK#* }"; echo "${disk2}"
# or worse
disk1=$(echo "${DISK}" | cut -d" " -f1)
disk2=$(echo "${DISK}" | cut -d" " -f2)
When you already know you want to split the fields, you can change your first read command. Replace read DISK with
read disk1 disk2 remaining_input
