Question

I have written a bash script that gets three paths based on input parameters and then then gets the imagename/filename in the path.

Something like:
I provide:

AA=/home/user

Then it uses the find command to get
/home/user/dir2/images/dir/tellmeimage1fun.bin

Finally I have to get tellmeimage1fun.bin as output.

Script:

#!/bin/bash  

echo "arg0 n/k/d"  

AA=$1  
CC=$3  

PATH1="`find $AA/dir2/images/dir/ -name *image1*.bin`"  
PATH2="`find $AA/dir2/images/dir/ -name *bimage2*.bin`"  
PATH3="`find $AA/dir2/images/dir/ -name *cimage3*.bin`"  

if [ $CC = "n" ] ; then  
    PATH=$PATH1  
elif [ $CC = "k" ] ; then  
    PATH=$PATH2  
else  
    PATH=$PATH3  
fi  

#Getting filename name from path:  
IMG="`ls $PATH | cut -d "/" -f6`"

OUTPUT:  
/users/prasapat/bin/sl5: line 22: ls: command not found  
/users/prasapat/bin/sl5: line 22: cut: command not found  

If I give complete paths to ls and cut they work. But i don’t want to do that for all commands in the script. If i remove the last line and echo the PATH variable it is completely fine. Only after adding the last command, I see the problem.

What am I doing wrongly?

Answer 1

The problem is that you are redefining the PATH variable where bash looks into to find the binary files if you don’t use a complete path when calling.

You should change the PATH in your bash script to MYPATH or something like that, so that it doesn’t mess with the already environmental variables.

If you don’t know what the PATH variable is for you can look at wikipedia’s article