please help with my script [closed]

Question

I need to write a simple homework script for my Unix 101 course. I need to take a directory name from the user, and list how many things are in it. For some reason it doesn't work and gets the next error message:

line 3: [: missing `]'
line 9: [: missing `]'

I tried a lot of things around the brackets. By the examples I found on the net, this should work though.

#!bin/bash

if [ $# -ne 1 ]
then
echo "Usage: $0 {dirname}"
exit 1
fi

if [ -d "$1" ]
then
echo `ls -l $1 | wc -l`
else
echo "$1 directory not found!"
fi

Answer 1

Below is the right script and it's correction inline:

#!/bin/bash    
# A slash is missing before "bin"

if [[ $# -ne 1 ]] # In bash use [[ and ]] instead
then
  echo "Usage: $0 {dirname}"
  exit 1
fi

if [[ -d "$1" ]]
then
    ls -l "$1" | wc -l  # a command output don't need echo again
else
    echo $1 directory not found  # !" would fail as ! indicate an event
fi

P.S For listing total files count in a directory, use something like this:

FILES=($1/*); echo $#{FILES[@]}, it's much faster

Answer 2

My conclusion after reading your question is that you did one of two things wrong:

• You did not post the same version of the code that caused the errors.
• Or, you edited the script under Windows and it has Windows-style newlines, which have an additional CR character before the Unix end-of-line character. In which case, see Script failing with "command not found: ^M" and How to bulk convert all the file in a file system branch between Unix and Windows line break format?.