Shell Programming and Scripting

You don't need to use cat with most commands; they take one or more filenames as arguments, and when they don't (as with tr), you can use redirection. With wc youcan use either, but the result is slightly different. In this case, you want redirection:

Code:

wc -l < out.txt

But you don't even need that. To test whether the file has a non-zero length use the -s option to test:

Code:

if [ -s out.txt ]; then
   cat out.txt
else
  echo "No log found from " $data
  exit 0
fi

  echo "No log found from " $data
  exit 0
else
  cat out.txt
fi