Rik Kabel and W. Wesley Groleau have pretty much answered this; I just want
to gather what they've said into one place.
Thanks to all of you -- I thought that had to be wrong, but I'm not a shell
programmer and didn't know how to do this.
First, it is critical whether Catherine means "set" literally (and a null
value is acceptable if the variable is set but null) or she really means
"non-null" (if the variable is set but null, that's unacceptable and the
default value should be used).
I hadn't thought of that, but on considering the issue, I mean "non-null",
since the recipes I use will fail if these variables are not set to
something valid. So it looks like I want....
VARIABLE=${VARIABLE:-defaultvalue} # if set but null is unacceptable
Now, a follow-up question. Will this work?
ADMINFOLDER=${ADMINFOLDER:-$DEFAULT}
What I'm trying to do is set a variable's default value to equal that of
another variable -- in this case, set the ADMINFOLDER value to equal the
DEFAULT mailbox. So does this syntax do the job, or do I need to do this
some other way?
Thank you! :)
--
Catherine Hampton <ariel(_at_)tempest(_dot_)boxmail(_dot_)com>