mjhjmtu

I have a simple bash function to increment a number and store it in a file:

get_next_int () tee

regarding this line:

echo "$((++my_num))" > "$my_file" | tee

out of curiousity, is there a way to overwrite the file with the incremented integer and echo it to stdout?

this answer about tee doesn't seem to cover my case.

How to redirect output to a file and stdout | Stack Overflow

also, as an aside, regarding this line:

typeset -i my_num=$(cat "$my_file")

that will grab the integer representation of the string from the file. However if the file is empty, I need to default to 1.

Is there a way to do something like:

typeset -i my_num=$(cat "$my_file" | default "1")

echo "$(( ++my_num ))" | tee "$my_file"

Tee writes te the named file(s) and to standard output by default.

After typeset -i my_num=$(cat "$my_file") (which could be typeset -i my_num=$(<"$my_file") in bash), you could use

my_num=$(( my_num == 0 ? 1 : my_num ))

to set it to 1 if it's value is zero. Integer variables in bash evaluate to zero if empty.

I was going to suggest my_num=$my_num:-1 but since my_num is an integer variable, it will expand to zero if it's empty, not to the empty string, which means that the $variable:-value parameter substitution would not work (this would otherwise expand to value if the variable was unset or empty).

I would probably have written the function as

get_next_int () tee "$HOME/next_int.json"

assuming "$HOME/next_int.json" always contained a single integer. I've left out the touch because the files modification timestamp would be updated by tee (keep touch if you need the access timestamp updated as well).