Question

I am having a logic issue with my UNIX number guessing game. The menu system works just fine (1 for play, 2 to quit, defensive response otherwise). But once in the game I am getting an output as follows:

1. OPTIONS:
2. (1. Play)
3. (2. Exit)
4. Enter number 1 or 2.
5. 1
6. Please enter you’re guess.
7. 5
8. pgm01[43]: [5: not found [No such file or directory]
9. pgm01[47]: [5: not found [No such file or directory]
10. Yay!!! 5 is the right number!!!
11. Your total number of tries were 0.

Here is the code (FYI this is in the KSH shell). I am guessing I have some sort of syntax error somewhere…

  #!/bin/ksh
  # CS2351 - UNIX Programming
  # Program 1

  x=$RANDOM%100+1
  tries=0
  guessInt=0
  userOption=0

  while ((1==1))
  do
     print "Welcome to the UNIX Number Guessing Game!"
     print "A random number between 1 and 20 has been selected."
     print "===========\nDirections: \n==========="
     print "1. Enter your guess. The program will tell you if it is high or low."
     print "2. The program will tell you if it is high or low."
     print "3. Change your guess."
     print "4. The computer will tell you how many guesses you had."
     print "=======\nOPTIONS\n======="
     print "1: Play \n2: Exit"
     print "Enter number 1 or 2."

     "Enter number 1 or 2."

     read userinput
     case "$userinput" in

     1)
        break;;
     2)
        print "Quitting program!!!"
        exit;;
     *)
        print "The input $userinput is invalid."
        print "Returning to main menu..."
        print "\n\n\n";;
     esac
  done

  print "Please enter you're guess."
  read guessInt
  while (($guessInt != "q"));
  do
     if [$guessInt -lt $x];
     then
        print "Your guess is too low, try again! (q to quit)."
        tries=tries+1
     elif [$guessInt -gt $x];
     then
        print "Your guess is too high, try again! (q to quit)."
        tries=tries+1
     else
        print "Yay!!! $guessInt is the right number!!!"
        break
     fi
  done

  print "Your total number of tries were $tries."
  exit

Any insight into this issue is appreciated!

Answer 1

As far as I can tell, you need double brackets for conditionals and some whitespace is significant. You need something like:

if [[ $guessInt -lt $x ]]; then

tries should also start at 1, since there’s no way you can win without guessing first.

You should also read guessInt again inside the while loop if their guess is wrong, because if you guess wrong the first time, it will just repeat forever (since the value of $guessInt doesn’t change between iterations of the loop).

Take a look at these shell script syntax examples; it’s got a lot of bash stuff but there’s some decent coverage of ksh as well.