Im having a problem assigning a resultant string of 3 piped commands to a variable.
The script is written in bash running on Mandrake 10.1.

The offending line is;
ALTCOURSE= `head -$LINE ./data | tail -1 | cut -d: -f1`

which is giving the error
./dupeswebct.sh: line 11: sm1024: command not found

as this works; echo `head -$LINE ./data | tail -1 | cut -d: -f1`
im guessing its the assignment to ALTCOURSE which is the problem.

The full script is;
#!/bin/bash
sed 's/-//g' ./webct.csv > ./webct2.csv

((TOTAL = `wc -l ./data | cut -f1 -d' '`))

echo $TOTAL
for ((LINE=1; LINE<=TOTAL; LINE++))
do
echo $LINE
#echo $(head -$LINE ./data | tail -1 | cut -d: -f1)
ALTCOURSE= `head -$LINE ./data | tail -1 | cut -d: -f1`
COURSE= `head -$LINE ./data | tail -1 | cut -d: -f2`
echo $ALTCOURSE $COURSE
sed -e "s/'$ALTCOURSE'/'$COURSE'/g" ./webct2.csv > ./webct3.csv
done

I guess there may be an alternative method as the head tail method seems a bit clumsy at best.

Thanks for your help
Cheers

The problem is the space between the = and the command. Change the line to ALTCOURSE=`head ....

What's happened is that bash interprets the space as a delimiter, and is setting ALTCOURSE to nothing, running the command specified in the backticks and then attempting to run the resulting value as a program. By removing the space, the value will be stored in ALTCOURSE as expected.

You'll also need to change the other lines where you've got spaces around the = sign.

As a quick side point, please use the code tags when you post code. It preserves the indentation and generally makes the post easier to read.

Thanks for help.
The other '=' works because of the (()) notation which I tried with ALTCOURSE but with no luck.
Ill use the code button in future as well thanks for the tip