Hi...

Could someone please tell me how to go about testing the return value of "program | grep -c 'string'" in a shell script?

I'm practically a virgin when it comes to writing scripts, and I just can't seem to get it right...

TIA,

-d.

if [ `program | grep -c "string"` -gt 0 ]
then
echo ok
else
echo not ok
fi

Ahh... it was the quotes around the command line which I was missing.

If you don't mind though, I could still use some help. :-)

After some debugging, I discovered that the expression was never evaluating to true. Echoing the statement to the command line produces a "no such file or directory" error, even when I fully qualify the program locations. e.g. "/sbin/route -n | /bin/grep -c "255.255.255.255".

Any ideas? The script is setting a path of /sbin:/usr/sbin:/bin:/usr/bin, so I would have assumed that this was sufficient.

Something's still missing though... :-|

-d.

if [ `/sbin/route | grep -c "255"` -gt 0 ]
then
echo ok
else
echo not ok
fi

well that works for me... i guess it's your string your grepping with, 255.255.255.255 wouldn't normaly be set up. not sure wat it would do actually...

I found my problem:

> if [ `/sbin/route | grep -c "255"` -gt 0 ]

I was using the (') single qoute to wrap the command, instead of (`). I didn't realize that there was a difference...


Many thanks to all!

-d.