How to warn for the use of unset variables in a korn shell script

Question

Is there any way to throw errors or warnings in a korn shell script to prevent the use of unset variables ? Let's assume I have a temporary folder that I want to remove.

TEMP_FILES_DIR='/app/myapp/tmp'
rm -Rf $TEMP_FILE_DIR #notice the misspelling

How to prevent this kind of mistakes before they actually happen?

I know the script should check for file existence and empty string before attempting to remove, this is just a silly example to illustrate a mistake that could have been avoided with some warnings. I don't know if this feature exists in ksh. If it does exist, how do you turn it on?

Answer 1

You could check the variable for having content, ie not being '', and print-out a message like "the variable is empty".

However, that's still not going to fix PEBCAK errors like this - all you'd know is that nothing happened.

Answer 2

The command

set -u

Will cause POSIX sh(1) and its derivatives to grouse when an attempt to expand an unset variable is made.

Example:

$ echo $foo

$ set -u
$ echo $foo
sh: foo: parameter not set