On Thu, 24 Sep 2009, eatsubway wrote:
>
> sry i have a stupid question.
>
> I have a variable and need to know how many items are in it.
>
> for example:
> variable="abc xyz foo"
> what program can i call to print out 3
>
> right now im doing this...
>
> Counter()
> {
> echo $#
> }
> Counter $IDs
> but that just seems stupid
That's a perfectly good way of doing it, but you will want to turn
off filename expansion if there's a chance that the value may
contain wildcards:
set -f
Counter $IDs
set +f
--
Chris F.A. Johnson, webmaster <http://woodbine-gerrard.com>
===================================================================
Author:
Shell Scripting Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach (2005, Apress)
