Conditional arguments How do I pass arguments when launching bash script so that specific lines are executed within the script For example (`createfile.sh`): #!/bin/bash export CLIENT1_DIR="<path1>" export CLIENT2_DIR="<path2>" chef-solo -c solo.rb -j client1.json chef-solo -c solo.rb -j client2.json Then $ ./createfile.sh client1 should only execute `client1` specific lines, and replacing it with `client2` should execute only `client2` specific lines.

There are many solutions to this. Here's one:


#!/bin/bash

client="$1"

case "$client" in
"client1") export CLIENT1_DIR="" ;;
"client2") export CLIENT2_DIR="" ;;
*) printf 'Invalid client argument: %s\
' "$client" >&2
exit 1 ;;
esac

chef-solo -c solo.rb -j "$client".json


The `client` variable gets the value of the first command line argument.

The `case` statement sets either `CLIENT1_DIR` or `CLIENT2_DIR` depending on this value (or exits with an error message if an invalid value was used).

Then `chef-solo` is invoked with the JSON file corresponding to what was given on the command line.