If condition works for first time but not for the second time

Question

I have defined the below for and if condition in a function. For the first time it runs well. Second time it doesn't gets executed after the for loop, it just writes the echo statement. Why does it behave like this?

for outputFile in $outputFiles
    do
            echo"Output file is $outputFile"

        if [ $outputFile == sampple*.pdf ]; then
            FromFile=$OutputFilePath
            transferFiles
         fi
done

Answer 1

To do a test on a string against a file globbing pattern, use case:

case "$outputFile" in
    sampple*.pdf)
        FromFile="$OutputFilePath"
        transferFiles ;;
esac

To do a test on a string against a regular expression in bash or ksh93:

if [[ "$outputFile" =~ ^sampple.*\.pdf$ ]]; then
    FromFile="$OutputFilePath"
    transferFiles
fi

Note the use of [[ ... ]] and =~ rather than [ ... ] and == here.

The [ ... ] construct does not generally support the == operator for comparing strings.

With [[ ... ]] and ==, the right-hand side is taken as a file globbing pattern. So the following should work (in bash or ksh93) as well:

if [[ "$outputFile" == sampple*.pdf ]]; then
   # as before
fi