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Bash is not exactly brilliant at performing numerical calculations. Recently I’ve required the need to see how many people are currently logged in on the terminal servers through NX. Now, if people are logged in via standard SSH, then it’s quite easy to count:

who | wc -l

However, if you want to perform a line count of the NX list, you have 6 lines at the top which are not part of the count. In order to perform this subtraction, we need to do a calculation. To do this in bash we use a $(()):

echo $((2 + 2))

So, if we were to use this when performing the command on nxserver, this is how it would look in the end:

echo $(($(/usr/NX/bin/nxserver --list | wc -l) - 6))

Or, if you’re not running this script as root (and using sudo):

echo $(($(sudo /usr/NX/bin/nxserver --list | wc -l) - 6))