Hello shell script programmers!
Im new to all this so go easy on the explanations please.

I want to use Shell commands only (Not perl) to ping a destination and then assign the average value to a variable.

Ive managed to do it using a combination of 'grep' and 'cut' but I run into problems when the result is more than 100.000 ms or less than 10.000ms since the number of digits is different. Make sense?

So I have:

ping -c 3 "$ip">temp1
grep "rtt" temp1 | cut -b31-36>temp2
read average<ukbabi1u2

This assigns the latency to $average. The cut command simply picks the average value from the line:

rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 63.385/78.393/97.608/14.284 ms

BUT if the results are not xx.xxx then it picks the wrong section.

Any better solutions?

As you already noticed, you are grabbing a fixed amount of positions.

There are many ways to solve this, here's (part) of one that uses cut.

rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 63.385/78.393/97.608/14.284 ms

The bold part is what you want to see. You can tell cut to use a different seperator (a spcae/tab is standard), which comes in handy, because the / could be used for this:

cut -d"/" -f7

Which does the following:

-d"/" => set seperator to /
-f7 => show field number 7

What you are left with is 14.284 ms, not the way you want it yet, but the rest you can try yourself

Hope this gets you going again.