On Mon, Oct 19, 2009 at 10:57:16 -0400, Dustin J. Mitchell wrote:
> The whitespace is significant in the command I showed:
> 
> if [ `/bin/ls /dumps` != "" ]
> 
> btw, the shell strips leading and trailing whitespace, so don't worry
> about the newline.

However, if /dumps is empty, the above will return a parse error (at
least in bash) since
  `/bin/ls /dumps`
will be blank and so no string will be found on the left side of the !=
after command subsitution.

Putting double quotes around it the invocation of ls seems to work both
when /dumps is empty and when it isn't:
  if [ "`/bin/ls /dumps`" != "" ]

                                                Nathan

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