bash script: how to run find command and variables

Question

I'm new to it. x can not be recognized from above statement. What is the problem?

x = find . -name "*.java" | wc -l
echo $x

Simon · Accepted Answer · 2013-10-10 04:29:02Z

5

It should be

x=$(find . -name "*.java" | wc -l)

(Note that there is no space around the = sign)

To answer your question, the problem is

the space after x causes the shell to try to execute the command x which probably does not exist
you want the result of the command to be stored in x, so you need to execute the command (hence the $(...))

edited Oct 10, 2013 at 4:29

answered Oct 10, 2013 at 4:23

Simon

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1 Comment

devnull Over a year ago

@sweet You probably inserted a space before =.

Simon · Accepted Answer · 2013-10-10 04:32:13Z

1

This should also work:

x=`find . -name "*.java" | wc -l`

edited Oct 10, 2013 at 4:32

Simon

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answered Oct 10, 2013 at 4:27

Nabren

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1 Comment

Floris Over a year ago

For no particular reason (maybe because it's one fewer character?) I prefer this notation. And it's a bit more stack-overflowey - the same backticks we use in markdown.

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