I have a strange Bash question for you. It's an edge case, but I've run into it just often enough that I'd like to know how to deal with it.
How do you determine if the directory you're in has been deleted? I've done this to myself: 'cd' to a directory in one terminal, then 'rm -r' that same directory in another terminal. It becomes very confusing when you try to do something in the first terminal: 'touch test.txt' responds with "touch: cannot touch 'test.txt': No such file or directory". Which is exceptionally hard to decipher because of course it doesn't exist, I was trying to create it! The worst case I've seen is 'git', and this is what's brought me back to this puzzle. If you're in a directory and you 'git rm' the last file in the directory, 'git' will helpfully delete the directory as well. Never mind that you're still in the directory, and are now in the very confusing position of being in a non-existent directory. One of my hobbies is tinkering with Bash Prompts. It's fairly easy to use 'test/[' to determine if a directory is writable with 'if [ -w .] ...' and then change the colour of the prompt based on the response. This gives immediate visual feedback on the write-status of the current directory. But test's '-w' and '-d' both claim that you're still in a valid directory under the above circumstances. Does anyone know of a simple way to find out if the directory you're currently in actually exists? I may have found my own answer: 'stat .' returns (in part) "Links: 0" which would seem to indicate a non-existent node. Is that a definitive answer? (I don't use 'stat' much.) I'm also interested to see if anyone else has a simpler or more "Bash" answer. Thanks. -- Giles https://www.gilesorr.com/ giles...@gmail.com --- Post to this mailing list talk@gtalug.org Unsubscribe from this mailing list https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
