Syntax error in script for chacking date of file modification

Question

So I wanted to make a script in shell that when executed, either modifies a file or echoes back a message.

Here is what I managed to write:

#!/bin/bash

current=$(date +%s)
last_modified='stat -c "Y" $/home/userr/textfile'

if
[ $((current-last_modified)) -gt 120 ]; then
        touch /home/userr/textfile;
else
        echo "File was modified less than 2 minutes ago";
fi

ShellCheck says everything is okay, but when I try to execute it it says: stat -c "Y" $/home/userr/textfile: syntax error: invalid arithmetic operator (error token is ""Y" $/home/userr/textfile")

Any idea where I do go wrong? Thank you in advance!

Answer 1

Your immediate problem might be this line:

last_modified='stat -c "Y" $/home/userr/textfile'

There you assign the string stat -C "Y" ... to the variable. What you might want to do instead is assigning the output of a command like stat -c %Y /home/userr/textfile which you could write as follows:

last_modified="$(stat -c %Y /home/userr/textfile)"

I recommend using #!/bin/sh -e for all shell scripts (you do not need bash here :) ) where -e enables fail-fast behaviour such that errors do not go undetected.