BASH if statements: ‘too many arguments’ error

Posted by Christian Ashby on April 28, 2010

If you are writing a BASH script which searches for a file pattern in a folder using this syntax:

[-f {pattern}]

Instead, use the following syntax:

files=$(ls {pattern} 2> /dev/null | wc -l)
if [ "$files" != "0" ]

This can be replaced with a similar command using find if required.

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Linux: Arrow keys don’t work?

Posted by Christian Ashby on March 26, 2010

Some Linux applications such as sqlplus still use readline to read what you type, which doesn’t properly support arrow keys, home, end, etc in most terminals.

You can fix this with a small wrapper called rlfe (for older Ubuntu/Debian variants) or rlwrap (for RedHat and most new distributions).

Once installed (apt-get install rlwrap for Debian/Ubuntu) you can enable it by default for your user by doing the following:

echo "alias {command}='rlwrap {command}'" >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc

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