Shell Programming and Scripting

I am writing a script that requires the number of days in any given month.

In the shell, I can use the command:

cal `date +%m` `date +%Y`| grep -v '[A-Za-z]' | wc -w

to give me the number of days in the month, but when I assign it to a variable:

VAR=`cal `date +%m` `date +%Y`| grep -v '[A-Za-z]' | wc -w`

and run the script I get this error message:

/test.sh: command substitution: line 5: syntax error near unexpected token `|'
./test.sh: command substitution: line 5: `| grep -v '[A-Za-z]' | wc -w'
./test.sh: line 5: +%mdate: command not found

Anyone know how I can fix the syntax so that this gets assigned to the var properly?

I guess you can't have nested backticks (`) and probably this is why it's throwing those errors.

You could try $() instead of ``, as in:

Code:

X=`cal $(date +%m) $(date +%Y) | grep -v '[A-Za-z]' | wc -w`

This works for me.

Thanks, this works perfectly.

FYI, you can combine the two date commands by using single quotes:

Code:

date '+%m %Y'