Hmmm, I musta missed your first reply. I can't remember what I was doing last Christmas eve. (I guess that explains it though...) We have a rule against bumping a thread if you don't immediately get an answer. But you needn't wait 10 months.

Doing ${X} is only absolutely required in something like "echo ${X}zzzzz". Without the brackets the variable name will be wrong. It's also required to invoke any of the shells advanced processing. ${x%%%} will strip a % character. But, $x%%% will just add three of them. But I often use the brackets just to make my scripts more readable.

You can get around the error message by doing:
if [ "$a" -gt "$b" ]
or switching to double brackets:
if [[ $a -gt $b ]]

But this will just make the error go away. The source of the problem is that the variables don't contain the right values. You need to echo their values just before the if statement. One of them must be empty which is why your test wants more tokens. And the other contains 1% which seems odd since you are stripping it. Or maybe one of the variables is something like "1% plus garbage" so the now internal % isn't stripped and the "plus garbage" is confusing the test. This is why you need to echo them is see what's happening.

Looking at the rest of your script, I can't really follow what's happening, but it's common for directories to be old. If you have /directory/subdirectory/files, as you add or remove files to the subdirectory, you are not affecting the mtime of directory. And rm will not remove a directory. You need to use rmdir.

Also you can't do
if ! [ -d jjjj ]

switch that to
if [ ! -d jjjj ]