Question

I’m trying to write a shell script to perform actions if a users home directory if over a certain size. Unfortionately when I try to use the read command to split up the du -s output I get ‘command not found’ since it tries to pass the number through to the shell, not into a variable like I want. Here’s what I have so far for the script.

#!/bin/bash cd /home for i in `ls` do     j=`du -s $i`     #this line gives me the error     k=`$j |read first;` done 

I get output like the following:

./takehome.sh: line 6: 3284972: command not found 

where 3284972 is the size of the directory.

Answer 1

I think you’ll want something along the lines of

#!/bin/bash for i in * do     j=`du -s '$i' | cut -f 1`     echo $i size is $j done 

Reading into another variable, read, and playing with that seems redundant.

I believe a more elegant solution is Jonathan Leffler’s second method (copy-pasted here)

#!/bin/bash cd /home du -s * | while read size name do     ... done