I am trying to wirte a program that takes three arguments, all representing file names. The script must verify that all names have been provided and if they are not, it should display an error message. If all 3 file names were given, the script should copy the contents of the first two files into the third. If the 3rd file contains data it should be overwritten. This is what I have so far and I can't seem to get it to work correctly.

#!/bin/bash

if [$# -eq 3]

then

f1="$1"
f2="$2"
f3="$3"

cat "f1" "f2" > "f3"

else

echo "please enter three file names"

fi







Thanks!

-Steph

When posting problems, show the exact output or error messages, and include how you ran the command. Others here don't really want to guess what went wrong. I see one possible problem.

Also, include your code in code tags [ code ] and [ / code ] (without spaces) to maintain the format of your code.

First, the test command (aka '[') needs to have a space on both sides of it:Secondly, you store data in the variables the right way, but you need to reference the variable with a '$' in front of it when you need to access what is in it:Other than that, the script should work.

It is likely to fail the requirement that "if the 3rd file contains data it should be overwritten".

I don't see why, other than if the file is read-only. Redirection will overwrite everything the file contains which is what the OP wanted.

I'd also quote the vars when catting them, otherwise you are going to get funky results when the file names have spaces in the middle.

You can also add a couple of checks to see if the files do actually exist and are readable (if [ ! -r $1 ]... etc. etc.)

This is precisely why actual testing on the given environment is necessary, and why I asked the OP to produce the error experienced in the OPs environment:

Thanks guys,

I got it working, it was the spacing.

I have more projects coming up. I will probably have more questions.



-Steph