Hello.
I'm trying to write a bash script that first checks to see if my USB hard drive is mounted before moving some files over to it.

I thought this code should work but I keep getting an error message and the conditional doesn't execute properly.

I can't see my error can anyone help?

##############################################
## check to see if the USB 2.0 Drive is mounted
file="/home/user/some.file"
a=`cat /proc/mounts | cut -d' ' -f2 | grep /backup`
b="/backup"

if[ "x$a" != "x$b" ] then
echo -e "\nUSB drive is not mounted\n"
exit
else
echo -e "\nmv $file /backup/$file\n"
fi

echo -e "\n\nDone!\n\n"
#############################################


By the way here is the error I get after calling the script from the command line:

./test_script.sh: line 6: if[ x/backup != x/backup ]: No such file or directory

USB drive is not mounted


Any ideas anyone?

Thanks

There's two problems in this line:
It should be:

Thanks!

This is a dumb question but why does the spacing matter?
My scripts are usually in perl where this generally isn't an issue.

It's because the test is actually run with a program called [ (really!) which is what you need to run. Without the space, your system was trying to run a program called if[ which doesn't exist.