"Simple Prog Exercise" difficult for me

[blinky85]

I am supposed to write a file called greetings that uses the cut command to calculate the hour of day, and after it calculates that I am supposed to display a message like "good morning" good afternoon, or good evening. After running the program I get an error:


jawaibel@cis:~$ bash greettings


21
greettings: line 10: [: missing `]'
greettings: line 13: [: missing `]'
good evening

jawaibel@cis:~$ vi greetttings
jawaibel@cis:~$ vi greettings
1 #
2 # greetings
3 # greetings program version 1
4 # A sample program using the if - then -elif construct
5 # This program displays greetings according to the time of day
6 #
7 echo
8 echo
9 hour= date | cut -c12-13
10 if ["$hour" -le 10]
11 then
12 echo good morning
13 elif ["$hour" -le 12]
14 then
15 echo good afternoon
16 else
17 echo good evening
18 fi
19 echo
20 exit 0
~
~
~
"greettings" 20L, 329C 10,1 All

any help is greatly appreciated

 

[blinky85]

Nevermind Figured it out forgot ` in the hour part

 

[p5wizard]

Well, in fact no student posting allowed on this site...

Still, here are some hints (if you read 'em before you hand in the assignment):

- you may want to name your script greetings, not greettings. The exercise says "a file called greetings". A nitpicking teacher might deduct a point...

- use indentation, it eases reading programming constructs like if-then-elif-else-fi and especially teachers like this ;-).
[tt]
if [ $hour -lt ...
then
echo ...
elif [ $hour -lt ...
then
echo ...
else
echo ...
fi
[/tt]
- Think again about your changeover-hours?

Good luck!


HTH,

p5wizard

 

[SamBones]

I realize part of the assignment was to use [tt]cut[/tt], but this is an easier way to get the hour...

# For Korn Shell
date '+%H' | read hour

# For Bourne Shell or BASH
hour=`date '+%H'`

Check the [tt]man[/tt] pages for [tt]date[/tt] for more info.

man date

 

[spamly]

I'd recommend getting a good shell scripting book.

I have (now out of print) UNIX Shells by Example. It's fantastic. Poke around here and you'll find other good recommendations.