Question

I am writing a little shell script to help setup a production/development environment for some of our software and part of it requires subversion.

I need a way to check if subversion is installed on a *nix(usually mac) machine.

I was thinking of checking if export SUBVERSION_HOME=/opt/subversion exists in .profile since that is what the devs use here, but are there any more concrete ways?

Answer 1

You could do something crude:

which svn

In a test:

if [[ -n $(which svn) ]]; then
    # do something
fi

Caveat: this would fail in the very unlikely even that someone has a svn installed that is not actually Subversion.