Shell Programming and Scripting

Folks,
I am using gcc 2.7.2.1 for NeXT PDO on my Solaris box. I want to get gcc version in a script. I do gcc -v and try to filter the output through awk. It won't come. Strange. Assigning it to the variable is also not possible. Any ideas ?

Cheers,
Amol.

You are getting output as follows:

% set dummy=`date`
% echo $dummy
Wed Jun 26 14:01:50 EDT 2002
% set dummy=`gcc -v`
Reading specs from /u/lib/gcc-lib/sparc-sun-solaris2.6/2.8.1/specs
gcc version 2.8.1
% echo $dummy
%

This is because in the program it is sending output to standard error. The following shows this:

% set dummy=`gcc -v|& awk '{print $3}'`
% echo $dummy
from 2.8.1
%
Note that it put the third field from each line into the variable dummy.

I know I probably should have shown this from a sh or ksh, but I leave it to you to do some research. It will probably work the same way - the |& tells it to send both standard output and standard error to the next command. I also leave the clean up of what you are trying to grab out of there to you - post back if you are having problems.

Well thanks. It works in csh..but I am writing script in sh.

I guess, & after | takes sh in background or something, it won't return to prompt if I try to set variable there.

However bash does not expect & to be there. It throws :

bash: command substitution: line 1: syntax error near unexpected token `&'
bash: command substitution: line 1: `gcc -v |& awk '{print $3 }''

Isn't there other way in sh/bash to capture output to std error ?

Okay, since |& doesn't work in the other shell's, here's a hint. In your root crontab (root normally has sh as it's default shell) have you ever seen 2>&1?

Yeah,

gcc -v 2>&1 | tail -1 | awk '{print $3}'

Thanks !!