Question

I am trying to find the path of a daemon using which command by the following in a ksh shell script

But if the daemon is not present it gives a warning in the format..

no DaemonName .....bla bla bla

But since I cannot display that directly, I currently do this

tmp=`which daemonName`
tmp2=`which daemonName | grep "no DaemonName"`
if [[ "$tmp2" != "" ]]
tmp=wrong name

How can I do the same in a simple single line?

What I really want is that if the daemon is not there, It should give a default string, while if present it should give the which commands output.

Answer 1

This will set the tmp variable like you want it:

tmp=$(which daemonName) || tmp="wrong name"

Edit: One issue with this suggestion is the which command behavior isn’t standardized, as the AIX odd implementation demonstrates.

As you use ksh, a simple workaround is to substitute the which command by the whence builtin:

tmp=$(whence -f daemonName) || tmp="wrong name"