While loop in Bash not running

Question

I'm pretty new with Bash scripting and am having trouble getting my 'while' loop to run. When I echo keywords, a whole list of words prints and then when I echo length, it prints 124. I believe I'm using the while loop and condition correctly, so I can't figure out what I'm doing wrong. Any thoughts?

keywords=$1
length=${#keywords}

echo "$keywords"
echo "$length"

if [ -z "$keywords" ]; then
    while [ $length -gt 100 ]; do
        echo "$keywords"
        echo "$length"

        keywords="${keywords%,*}"
        length=${#keywords}
    done
fi

echo $keywords

choroba · Accepted Answer · 2016-09-17 19:45:11Z

2

The problem is here:

[ -z "$keywords" ]

-z is true if its argument is an empty string. Something of length 124 is definitely far from empty. You probably meant -n.

Next time, please also include the input in the question so we can reproduce the problem.

answered Sep 17, 2016 at 19:45

choroba

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2 Comments

chepner Over a year ago

The entire if statement is unnecessary; if the string is empty, [ $length -gt 100 ] will fail and the loop will just be skipped.

HGDev Over a year ago

I must have misread the documentation and had the empty string flag backwards. Thank you!

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