Shell Programming and Scripting

What I plan on doing is have have this script run via a cron job every minute and what its going to do is look at the size of foo.txt and if it has any data then execute start_presentation_mine.sh then exit.

Code:

#!/bin/bash

ppts1=/ticker/powerpointshare
VAR=` wc -c /tmp/foo.txt | awk -F" " '{print $1}' ` 


cd $ppts1

ls -rt | tail -1 > /tmp/foo.txt


if [ "$VAR" > "0" ]; then
                wineserver -k
                sleep 5
                bash /scripts/start_presentation_mine.sh
fi

rm -f /tmp/foo.txt
exit

A issue that im starting to see is this scrip is running every minute via cron like it is supposed to but it seems to always create a blank file named 0

Use if [ $var -gt 0 ] instead of if [ "$var" > 0 ]
">" is understood as a redirection operator in single square brackets [ ]. If you really insist on using ">" to mean greater than, use [[ ]] as in if [[ $var > 0 ]]

And, awk's default field seperator is space. So, you need not mention -F" ". var=`wc -c /tmp/foo.txt | awk '{print $1}'` would suffice.

Another alternative would be to use var=`cat /tmp/foo/txt | wc -c`