Printing connected users in bash script

Question

I have a script file like this:

#!/bin/bash
clear 

echo "The script starts now."
echo "Hi, user!"
echo 

echo "I will now fetch you a list of connected users:"
echo 
w

echo "I'm setting two variables now."
COLOUR="black"
VALUE="9"

echo "This is a string: $COLOUR"
echo "And this is a number: $VALUE"
echo 

I observed that the effect of w is that it prints the following:

 18:06:36 up  7:43,  3 users,  load average: 0.40, 0.56, 0.64
USER     TTY      FROM              LOGIN@   IDLE   JCPU   PCPU WHAT
hes      tty7                      10:23    7:43m 12:31   0.96s gnome-session -
hes      pts/0    :0               15:41    4.00s  1.38s 11.46s gnome-terminal
hes       pts/2    :0               17:20   44:52   0.79s 11.46s gnome-terminal

when I typed echo " statement" in terminal , it prints the statement. But I could not understand w here. in terminal echo w , prints w not as above. Can someone help me in understanding how this work?

Answer 1

I really don't understand what you're doing. w is a command and your scriptis running it, what were you expecting?

## This echo prints the string within the quotes: "I will ..."
echo "I will now fetch you a list of connected users:"
## This echo prints an empty line
echo 
## This runs the command 'w' which prints connected users
w

echo w on the other hand will simply print the letter w since you are not running the command. If you want to echo the command's output, run echo $(w). That, however, is pointless since it will loose the formatting and simply running w is enough.