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I have been writing a bash script to call in my .bashrc file to print the results of whatis for a random command in my /usr/bin folder and wanted to exclude commands that returned "nothing appropriate" in the result and even if I use grep, wc, expr, ==, nothing seems to work. I have pretty much used every example here, and here with no progress. This is what I have so far but failes to do what I want when it finds somthing that contains "nothing appropriate." If anyone could figure out how to get it to work or what a good solution would be in this situation I would be greatfull. 

#! /bin/bash

echo "Did you know that:";
while :
do
  RESULT=$(whatis $(ls /usr/bin | shuf -n 1))
  if [[ $RESULT != *"nothing appropriate"* ]]
  then
    echo $RESULT
    break
  fi
done
Community
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Crazybonze
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1 Answers1

1

whatis prints the nothing appropriate message on the standard error stream. This stream is not caught by the $( ). This is the reason of your issue.

This is a way to fix it:

#! /bin/bash

echo "Did you know that:";
while :
do
  RESULT=$(whatis $(ls /usr/bin | shuf -n 1) 2>&1 | cat - )
  if [[ $RESULT != *"nothing appropriate"* ]]
  then
    echo $RESULT
    break
  fi
done

The 2>&1 | cat - addition does the trick

GMichael
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