How do you continue a sentence with a command inside

Question

For example, I have been trying to say "There are 10 people online at the moment" in my script file.

I can never seem to get the command working without the "people online at the moment" part on the next line.

At the moment, I have

w='who | wc -l' 
echo "There are $w people online at the moment"

However, I always end up with the output

There are who | wc -l users online at the moment

How do you get the command working in the middle? I've been trying to look and copy examples, but it doesn't seem to help my command substitution issue.

Anthon · Answer 1 · 2014-12-13T08:27:11.540

20

You want the output of

who | wc -l

assigned to w, not that string, which is what you get because of the quotes around it. You should use command substitution $(...):

w=$(who | wc -l)
echo "There are $w people online at the moment"

(you can also use the backquotes, but you cannot easily nest those).

edited Dec 13 '14 at 08:27

answered Dec 12 '14 at 07:01

Anthon

79,293

In some shells, including Bash, you can nest backquotes. It requires nested escapes, see example at http://stackoverflow.com/a/2657037/776723 – ShadSterling Dec 13 '14 at 07:57
1

@Polyergic Thanks. I updated my answer, but I think I will stick with nesting $() myself ;-) – Anthon Dec 13 '14 at 09:31

score 10 · Answer 2 · answered Dec 12 '14 at 07:03

10

Another solution:

echo There are $(who | wc -l) people online at the moment

answered Dec 12 '14 at 07:03

Sreeraj

5,062

score 6 · Answer 3 · edited Dec 12 '14 at 07:05

6

you should use backtick to execute command

w=`who | wc -l` echo "There are $w people online at the moment"

edited Dec 12 '14 at 07:05

Jenny D

13,172

answered Dec 12 '14 at 06:58

Security Beast

902
7
14

15

See why $(...) is preferred over backticks... – jasonwryan Dec 12 '14 at 07:06
7

Valid point. "The backtick is also easily confused with a single quote." exactly what happened here. – Ghanima Dec 12 '14 at 07:17
@Ghanima: Indeed! This question is a great example for when we need to demonstrate why backticks should be avoided. :) – PM 2Ring Dec 12 '14 at 09:04
Good, I've upvoted only this answer because it's the only one which explained exactly where the OP had the mistake. Whether backticks are good or evil are just side notes. – Ruslan Dec 13 '14 at 08:30

How do you continue a sentence with a command inside

3 Answers3

Linked