Shell Programming and Scripting

I have a shell script that is outputting from a database. What is coming from the DB is this:

-----------
50

(1 rows affected)

The issue that I have is there is an if statement in my script that looks at the first line and reads the number there. Unfortunately because of how this comes out it reads either the blank line or the hyphen as an invalid character and throws an error. I know you can use SED to remove unwanted text and spaces however I'm not sure exactly how to put it together in this instance. I do have an SED command in my script:

Code:

${SED} 's/  */ /g' <extract_dt.txt > temp.txt

From what I have been told this just replaces any time there is two spaces in a row with one space but I need it to do a bit more than that for my purposes. Ideally I'd want to trim everything that's not the number but if I can at least get the number on the top row that would be just fine. Thanks.

I guess you want to filter out the forest line starting with ------------ , right ?
grep -v can do .Something like that .

Code:

script output | grep -v "^-"

Thanks I guess my question is would this just remove the hyphens or would it remove the spaces and move the number to the top?

It would remove the lines starting with hyphens .
In this scenario , it would remove the hypens and place the number on top .Try out in your box .

I used both what you said and

Code:

script extract_dt.txt | grep -v "^-"

In both instances it didn't change my text file at all and it hangs Putty.

You are not getting me at all my friend , script is not a command or something .i wanted you to pipe your script output to grep .

I guess extract_dt.txt contains , hypens and numbers , right ?
do below on commandline.

Code:

grep -v "^-" extract_dt.txt

Thanks again we are very close. There's still a blank line at the top.