Question

I googled for this, but I can’t figure out why Bash complains with the following code to check if a directory exists:

test.mk

#!/bin/bash

MYDIR="dl"
all:
        if [ ! -d $MYDIR ]; then
        #if [ ! -d "${MYDIR}" ]; then
        #if [ ! -d ${MYDIR} ]; then
                #Here
        fi

make -f test.mk

if [ ! -d YDIR ]; then
/bin/sh: Syntax error: end of file unexpected
make: *** [all] Error 2

Does someone know why it fails? And why does it call /bin/sh instead of /bin/bash? Thank you.

---

Edit: unlike Bash, make doesn’t support multi-line block. Here’s working code:

MYDIR="dl"
all:
        if [ ! -d ${MYDIR} ]; then\
                echo "Here";\
        else\
                echo "There";\
        fi

Answer 1

The #!/bin/bash shebang that you inserted at top is useless, and it is treated by make as a comment.

make sends by default commands to /bin/sh. To specify a different shell, use the macro SHELL = /bin/bash.

Moreover, you need to escape your variable:

if [ ! -d ${MYDIR} ]

I’m not sure if make can handle multi-line statements, so try to put all the if block in a line.

if [ ! -d ${MYDIR} ]; then DO_SOMETHING; DO_SOMETHING_ELSE; fi