Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi,

Time till when the application should run is indicated in a file. First line is hour and second line is minute.
file:
10
55
Means my application should run till 10:55.

Now in a shell script, i am trying to make that logic but with no luck.

min=`tail -n 1 /file_with_time`
hour=`head -n 1 /file_with_time`

chour=`date +%H`
cmin=`date +%M`

if [ $chour < $hour ] <== Shell script throws error here when value is two digits ie if first line the file is > 9.
then
run_my_app
fi

if [ $chour = $hour ]
then if [ $cmin < $min ]
then
run_my_app
fi
fi

Kindly suggest.
SDG

Please put code inside [code] tags.

You don't need two external commands to read two lines from a file:

Code:

{
 read min
 read hour
} < /file_with_time

You don't need two calls to date (and it will be wrong if the hour changes between one call and the next).

Code:

eval "$( date "+hour=%H min=%M" )"

The less-than operator is -lt:

Code:

if [ $cmin -lt $min ]

But you could also do it with a single if statement:

Code:

if [ $chour$cmin -lt $hour$min ]