UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi All,

I might be making a silly mistake but I need ur help.

I have initialized various variables:
cur_month=`date +%m`
cur_year=`date +%y`
last_year=`expr $cur_year \- 1`


It works fine for cur_month & cur_year....but has problems with last_year.

FOR LAST YEAR IT GIVES A FOLLOWING MESSAGE
"expr: An integer value was expected"

Can you please help me with this.

Thanks.
Rooh

What shell are you using and what OS (and version)?

I tried the following on both ksh and sh on Solaris 8 - had no problem (unless I added the /- that you show - but I never got the error you have). Are you sure this is the expr command that is giving you the error? Is this a script? Can you post it?

$ cat ly
#!/bin/sh
cur_month=`date +%m`
cur_year=`date +%y`
last_year=`expr $cur_year - 1`
echo $last_year

I would also suggest you use the whole year since cur_year comes back with 03 and the subtraction gives you 2, not 02. You may mess yourself up if expecting something different.

Hi RTM.

Thanks, it worked......I am using Ksh.

I used last_year=`expr $cur_year - 1` instead of last_year=`expr $cur_year \- 1` and it works fine.

Thanks alot


Rooh