Shell Script – Problem with Counting Characters

shell-script

I'm trying to learn the basics and I have run into an issue with my script counting the characters of a user's input. Here is my script, can someone point out where I'm going wrong please?

#!/bin/bash

echo "Enter a word!"    
read INPUT_STRING   
len= echo $INPUT_STRING | wc -c 
echo "Your character length is " $len
exit

Best Answer

every beginning is hard:

#!/bin/bash
read INPUT
echo $INPUT
len=$(echo -n "$INPUT" | LC_ALL=C.UTF-8 wc -m)
echo $len

specifically, there must not be a space surrounding = and a separate command needs to be enclosed inside $(...). Also, you might want to write your variables in quotes " using this syntax "${INPUT}", this ensures that the variable is not accidentally concatenated with what follows and can contain special chars (e.g. newlines \n).

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Bash – Conditional execution block with || and parentheses problem

What you're searching is something like this:

[ "$USER" = "x" ] || { echo "Time to bail"; exit 1; }

The { list; } statement executes the commands in the given list in the current shell context. No subshell is created, unlike in the ( list ) notation. An exit call between parentheses will exit that subshell and not the parent shell itself.

The examples in your question with the if-statement on one line or multiple lines are syntactically correct. I cannot reproduce that behavior. It doesn't matter how many lines there arre; the if-statement never starts a subshell in its body.

BTW: I added double quotes to the variable in the condition, because when the variable $USER is empty, the construct would expand to [ = "x" ] which is not valid. With double quotes it expands to [ "" = "x" ].

Best Answer

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Bash – Conditional execution block with || and parentheses problem

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