"integer expression expected" error

Question

I want to write a greeting script. What I have so far:

if [ "$HOUR" -lt 12 ]; then
    echo " Good Morning Mohamed"
elif [ "$HOUR" -ge 12 ] && [ "$HOUR" -lt 16 ]; then
    echo " Good Afternoon Jama."
elif [ "$HOUR" -ge 16 ]; then
    echo " Good Evening Jama."  
fi

This give me an error

integer expression expected

How can I fix this?

You have to assign some numeric value to `HOUR`. It's either empty or a string, but it's impossible to tell without the rest of your script. If this is your complete script, then it's obviously the empty string. — Benjamin W., Mar 07 '17 at 03:38
If you don't want to set `HOUR` and want the code to still work, you can use `if (( HOUR > 12 )); then ...` construct. Look at this post for more details: http://stackoverflow.com/a/8552128/6862601 — codeforester, Mar 07 '17 at 03:41

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Mar 14 '17 at 21:26

As the comments indicate, it works if you just give HOUR a value (at least on my CentOS 6 system):

HOUR=`date +%k`
if [ "$HOUR" -lt 12 ]; then
    echo " Good Morning Mohamed"
elif [ "$HOUR" -ge 12 ] && [ "$HOUR" -lt 16 ]; then
    echo " Good Afternoon Jama."
elif [ "$HOUR" -ge 16 ]; then
    echo " Good Evening Jama."  
fi

"integer expression expected" error

1 Answers1