UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi,
I am working on a script that inserts one row of data at the time to a table.
Among the fields of that table is the “serial” which is the auto increment. I need to be able to retrieve last inserted row id to use it for another insert.
To retrieve last row id right after I do successful insert I am doing following
....
$sql1 = " \"SELECT MAX(serial) FROM transaction\"";
$command = "echo $sql1 | tee -a h.sql &>/dev/null";
system($command);

$comm = "dbaccess mydb h.sql ";

system($comm)

However I am getting error

sh: syntax error at line 1: `|' unexpected

Can some see any problems with the $command ( I assume that is where error is)? Or can it even be done this way. I guess my question is How does one SELECT a value from a table into a Unix variable?

Thank you in advance

I'm not going to pretend be a Unix/SQL pro, my SQL experience is through Perl. So I'm just guessing here. Since it is finding the unexpected "|" immediately following your variable for the SELECT statement, it makes me wonder if the escaped quotation marks are being taken literally in your next statement. I mean, if you do the substitution manually, it reads like this:

$command = "echo "SELECT MAX(serial) FROM transaction" | tee -a h.sql &>/dev/null";

So does using the variable "sql1" make that statement realize that the inner set of quotation marks should not be interpreted literally in that statement? I don't know. But it seems worth a shot to try it in a different context, i.e. use unescaped single quotation marks in the first statement, such as

$sql1 = " 'SELECT MAX(serial) FROM transaction'";

Like I said though, I'm just guessing!

Yes, the problem was the quotes. I figured out the syntax. Thank you for the reply