The following is a fragment of a bash script that I'm running under cygwin on Windows:
deployDir=/cygdrive/c/Temp/deploy
timestamp=`date +%Y-%m-%d_%H:%M:%S`
deployDir=${deployDir}/$timestamp
if [ ! -d "$deployDir" ]; then
echo "making dir $deployDir"
mkdir -p $deployDir
fi
This produces output such as:
making dir /cygdrive/c/Temp/deploy/2010-04-30_11:47:58
mkdir: missing operand
Try `mkdir --help' for more information.
However, if I type /cygdrive/c/Temp/deploy/2010-04-30_11:47:58
on the command-line it succeeds, why does the same command not work in the script?
Thanks,
Don
Change:
mkdir -p $deploydir
to
mkdir -p "$deployDir"
Like most Unix shells (maybe even all of them), Bourne (Again) Shell (sh/bash) is case-sensitive. The dir var is called deployDir
(mixed-case) everywhere except for the mkdir
command, where it is called deploydir
(all lowercase). Since deploydir
(all lowercase) is a considered distinct variable from deployDir
(mixed-case) and deplydir
(all lowercase) has never had a value assigned to it, the value of deploydir
(all lowercase) is empty string ("").
Without the quotes (mkdir $deploydir
), the line effectively becomes mkdir
(just the command without the required operand), thus the error mkdir: missing operand
.
With the quotes (mkdir "$deploydir"
), the line effectively becomes mkdir ""
(the command to make a directory with the illegal directory name of empty string), thus the error mkdir: cannot create directory
'.
Using the form with quotes (mkdir "$deployDir"
) is recommended in case the target directory name includes spaces.
You can't have colons in file names on Windows, for obvious reasons.