Question

i am new to shell scripting and i found following line of code in a given script.

could someone explain me what does the following lines of codes means

1. _filecount=echo ${_filelist} | wc -w | awk '{ print $1 }'

2. printk "archiveWLS(): ${_filecount} file(s)"

Thanks in advance for any help

Answer 1

_filecount=echo ${_filelist} | wc -w | awk '{ print $1 }'

wc -w: wc is word-count, wordcount counts words, lines, characters and so on, -w only outputs the word count.

The output is piped to awk, to print only the first word of output. If you use

 wc -w FILE 

the filename would be printed, and it would make sense to strip it away with awk. Doing it with a piped output, where there is no filename, is superflous.

As assignment, the line should instead be:

_filecount=$(echo ${_filelist} | wc -w )

Without $(…) or backticks, it doesn’t work, and filecount is just assigned the word “echo”. Seems like a poorly written script.

printk isn’t defined in bash, nor is it a well established gnu programm from the coreutils.

Maybe it is defined in the script itself.