Shell Programming and Scripting

Good morning,
My first time actually posting in this forum, though I have used this forum to help with numerous projects.

I am trying to figure out why my if statement does not work. I have a file where a line is inputted every 15 seconds. I want this if statement to check what the last line is, and if it "X" to not do anything, but if the line is anything else, to execute a command. My problem is that it executes the command regardless what the last line in the file is.

Code:

if [ tail -1 musiclog.txt = 'Lecrae Up' ];

then 

echo OK

else
gnome-terminal -e "pkill mplayer"

fi

This is probably not the most elegant way in the least to accomplish this task. So any guidance of how to proceed is appreciated.

What Operating System and version are you running and what Shell do you use?

Hi Shanrunt,

I would use grep, the -q option suppress output and <(...) is a command redirection.

Code:

$ cat infile
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
$ grep -q '6' <(tail -1 infile) && echo "Found" || echo "NOT found"
NOT found                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    
$ grep -q '7' <(tail -1 infile) && echo "Found" || echo "NOT found"
Found

Ubuntu 12.04 bash shell