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Shell Programming and Scripting

Comparing Negative Numbers with If/Else

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# 8  
Old 07-20-2011
This works using the korn shell on Solaris:
Code:
#!/bin/ksh

ValA=-29344
if (( "$ValA" < 0 )) ; then
  echo "NEGATIVE"
else
  echo "POSITIVE"
fi

exit 0

# 9  
Old 07-20-2011
is there another way to do this without using if/else? because it appears if/else is just too weak for arithmetic calculations.

maybe awk can do this?
# 10  
Old 07-21-2011
I simply cannot make any shell I have -- bash, dash, ash, pdksh, or zsh -- behave as you're saying they do. And I have a system very similar to yours, with the same shells you do plus many more you don't. Negative signs just work, everywhere. I think something else is going wrong.

Post exactly what you're doing, word for word, letter for letter, keystroke for keystroke -- and maybe we'll see what you're doing wrong.
# 11  
Old 07-21-2011
I suspect there are ^M characters on the end of the lines (aka MSDOS format). Did you edit in/transfer the file from windows?

Try running dos2unix against your file.
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