UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

is there any way to compare two grep commands in an if statement? like:

if grep blah = grep blah blah
then

is there a way to store the values of the greps and compare them? the greps are counting pattern matches in two different files and i need to make sure they match.

why don't you just diff the fiiles? see "man diff" ....

i guess i wasn't specific enough, the compare is a little complicated. In one file i am counting the instances of the pattern with grep -c and i want to compare that count to the value in field 3 of another file where field 1 = C

so, let me try to explain a little easier, i want to compare the values of these two statements:

grep -c <pattern> <file>
grep "^C" <file> | awk -F'|' '{print $3}'

if there is an easier way to do this i'm all ears, i don't even know if this is possible to begin with so any input is appreciated

sounds simple enough ... just to confirm, can you post a line from the second file?

C| |00000009| |00000000|

so in other words, i'm counting in one file the number of time s pattern comes up and i want to see if that number matches the number in field 3, in this case it's 9, do I have to account for the leading zeros in the field when comparing?

not required ... treat both of them like numbers ....

Code:

#! /bin/ksh

InstCount=$(grep -c pattern file1)
ReqdCount=$(awk -F"|" '/^C/ {print $3}' file2)

if [ $InstCount -eq $ReqdCount ]
then
    echo "Counts are the same."
else
    echo "Somebody fibbed on the count."
fi

exit 0

you can do this ( in bash )

c=`grep foo fil1`
d=`grep bar fil2`

if [ "$c" == "$d" ]; then
...
else
...
fi

HTH