I'd like to share a bit of bash script that I wrote yesterday that I am both very proud of and very disturbed by:

DfLine=$(df -h /misc/backup | tail -1)
# convert DfLine into a bash array...
DfLine=(${DfLine// / })
echo -n ${DfLine[3]}
echo " free space remaining on /misc/backup"

So basically I did a perl split on whitespace and stuffed the results into an array. Actually I'm think that's a split on " *", not whitespace as I suspect it wouldn't work on tabs. I didn't test that though.

Also I think it should be possible to do the command substitution and the expansion of $DfLine in one go but all the $({$({${{ started to make my head hurt so I stopped there.

Inspiration from this unix.com page.

This is probably a pretty good indication that it's time to re-write the script in perl.