Hi,

I'm currently studying shell scripting and I have a small problem with a very simple script. I know a lot of you will consider this very easy but I can't see the problem.

I wrote a script that aim to count all the users registred in the system and will echo a string based on the amount of users(greater on smaller than the argument passed to the scrip).
Here is what I wrote:

#!/bin/sh
number=$1
all_users=`cut -d: -f1 /etc/passwd | wc -l`
if [ $all_users>$number ]; then
echo "More than $number users in the system"
else
echo "Less than $number users in the system"
fi

Can any of you see the problem before I say what it is??

For those who don't see it - I always get that there are more users than my input even if the argument is larger than the actual registred users.

Try this:

Similarly, it's also possible to use -lt (less than), -ge (greater or equal) -eq (equal) or -le (less than or equal).
I think that's all of them.

thanks. that did the trick !

Does this mean the shell doesn't support these operators: < > = >= <= ?

Hmm, one thing that I'd forgotten was you could have written something like (($all_users > $number)), which should work. If you use the square brackets though, then <, > etc won't work on numbers. This page explains things better than I probably can.