Save iwconfig to a variable

Question

I am trying to assign Link Quality (percentage) from iwconfig to a variable in a .sh file. This is for a conky theme I'm making. To do this I have the following:

lnk=$(iwconfig mlan0 | awk '/Link Quality/{split($2,a,"=|/");print int((a[2]/a[3])*100)}')

This command works if I enter it at the command line. However, in the script file it does not work or at least it doesn't seem to. I can put echo $lnk right after and it returns nothing. The real kicker is, this was working before, but I changed distributions from Mint to MX Linux. I don't know how much that would affect anything but it's the only change I've made before this stopped working.

The other thing is, I also use a very similar script that was based on this one for battery level. It works great. But I can't understand why this one all of a sudden doesn't work anymore.

UPDATE - While I haven't yet figured out what was wrong, I did find a work-around. Instead of using a .sh file to get the information I wanted and manipulating it from there, I just decided to do it directly in the conky template. There's always more than one way to get the desired output.

Thanks anyway for what it's worth.

Answer 1

Does classic Bourne shell's backtick-based construct work?

Like following script...

#!/bin/sh
LINK_Q="`iwconfig mlan0 | awk '/Link Quality/{split($2,a,"=|/");print int((a[2]/a[3])*100)}')`"
echo "$LINK_Q"

If it doesn't, do you have a way to know which exact brand and version of shell that Conky used for running the script?

P.S. If you changed GNU/Linux distribution, also double-check the interface name.