Question

I have a command line program that prints out a report such as:

I found 0 problems on your database,
0 problems were found on your database

and so on.

I would like to write a linux shell script that exports the number only to a variable. I can’t find the correct way of doing so. I suspect I am not using grep properly (or there’s a better command);
i.e.

I found 43 problems on your database,
43 problems were found on your database
$VAR=43

please advise

Answer 1

$ var=$(echo -e "I found 43 problems on your database,
43 problems were found on your database" | grep -om 1 '[0-9]\+')
$ echo $var
43