Validating parameters to a bash script

Posted by nickf on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by nickf
Published on 2009-03-31T00:29:45Z Indexed on 2010/03/26 15:03 UTC
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I'm a total newbie to doing any bash scripting, but I came up with a basic one to help automate the process of removing a number of folders as they become unneeded.

#!/bin/bash
rm -rf ~/myfolder1/$1/anotherfolder
rm -rf ~/myfolder2/$1/yetanotherfolder
rm -rf ~/myfolder3/$1/thisisafolder

This is evoked like so:

./myscript.sh <{id-number}>

The problem is that if you forget to type in the id-number (as I did just then), then it could potentially delete a lot of things that you really don't want deleted.

Is there a way you can add any form of validation to the command line parameters? In my case, it'd be good to check that a) there is one parameter, b) it's numerical, and c) that folder exists; before continuing with the script.

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