[surfnschultz]

I want to list the processes I am about to kill and ask the user for confirmation.

So my questions is how to make this command show on the screen

echo ps -ef | grep $portnum


this doesn't work as is in my script

[tsunam]

well the echo is going to echo "ps -ef" ....as in the letters

you should be able to do a la="ps -ef | grep $portnum"
echo la

[surfnschultz]

cool let me try that out asap.

[surfnschultz]

Nope did work says varible la not fuound? weirdness....

[surfnschultz]

now no error BUT no output to screen

la="ps -ef | grep $portnum"
echo la

[Squashman]

Back Ticks.

[surfnschultz]

ps -ef | grep $portnum > $2

this worked, it is funny how you can be in the bathroom and think OH **** I figured it out. hahaha

[Squashman]

The Back Ticks would have worked as well. Anytime you want to echo the output of a command or assign it to a variable, you need to enclose the command in `Back Ticks`. Otherwise your echo command or your variable will just equal the characters you typed.

[codejockey]

A few thoughts:

surfnschultz:
now no error BUT no output to screen
la="ps -ef | grep $portnum"
echo la

You have echoed just "la" to the screen, not the contents of the la variable. Try echo $la instead.

squashman:
The Back Ticks would have worked as well. Anytime you want to echo the output of a command or assign it to a variable, you need to enclose the command in `Back Ticks`. Otherwise your echo command or your variable will just equal the characters you typed.

Pretty much right. You can also simply execute the command to display the output to the screen; as you point out, back ticks are especially useful when you want to capture the result of a command, but you can display the result without using back ticks.

surfnschultz:
Not sure what you are doing here, but suspect a typo. You can certainly execute the ps -ef command in your script, and without any additional magic, the output will be displayed on the screen. The redirection to $2 (which I suspect is either a typo or superstitious behavior ) is not needed. My guess is that $2 is NULL (i.e., there is no second argument to your script, and your redirection to $2 resolves to a redirection to (NULL string) which is effectively stdout -- what the command would have done anyway. I may have misunderstood what was going on, however, so please let me know what I've missed.

Hope this helps.

[Squashman]

Glad you come around once in a while CodeJockey.