Shell Programming and Scripting

/etc/profile is often a complicated script, is the thing, so using it may be somewhat overkill, not to mention, might do something unexpected when used non-interactively.

There are too many double quotes on this line. You cannot nest double quotes. As it stands the whole meaning of the line becomes altered and the Shell tries to execute a string between the backticks.

Try this to remove the syntax issue caused by the excess quotes:

Code:

amt=`echo "scale=3;$numerator/$base*100" |bc |cut -d. -f1`

However this suggested revised version of the command would be mathematically correct and totally unambiguous:

Code:

amt=`echo "scale=3;(($numerator * 100) / $base)" | bc | cut -d. -f1`

Ps. I can't see anythng to stop this corrected command working from cron. Don't execute /etc/profile in your script - it will not help.

Thanks. I believe the qoutes were the issue as after removing the outside qoutes the command executed successfully through the cron.