Calling linux utilities with options from within a Bash script.

Posted by Kyle on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Kyle
Published on 2010-04-04T14:43:15Z Indexed on 2010/04/04 14:53 UTC
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Filed under:

bash

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script

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Utilities

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find

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wc

This is my first Bash script so forgive me if this question is trivial. I need to count the number of files within a specified directory $HOME/.junk. I thought this would be simple and assumed the following would work:

numfiles= find $HOME/.junk -type f | wc -l
echo "There are $numfiles files in the .junk directory."

Typing find $HOME/.junk -type f | wc -l at the command line works exactly how I expected it to, simply returning the number of files. Why is this not working when it is entered within my script? Am I missing some special notation when it comes to passing options to the utilities?

Thank you very much for your time and help.

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