Integer Expression Expected - shell

Question

Code sample :
declare -i a=1
echo "The number of NMON instances running in Performance VM"
ps -ef | grep nmon | awk '{ print $2 }' | wc -l
echo "---------------------------------------------"
num2= ps -ef | grep nmon | awk '{ print $2 }' | wc -l
#num1=${num2%%.*}
#num2 = $(ps -ef | grep nmon | awk '{ print $2 }' | wc -l)
echo "---------------------------------------------"
echo "${num2}"
while [ "$a" -lt "$num2" ]
do
kill -USR2 $(ps -ef | grep nmon | awk '{ print $2 }' | head -1)
a=`expr $a + 1`
done
In the Output i am getting the following error
[: : integer expression expected
in the debug it shows
++ '[' 1 -lt '' ']'
that num2 is empty but when i echo the num2 value i am getting the value correctly.
Output:
The number of NMON instances running in Performance VM
1
1
thanks in advance

Answer 1

The 1 you see in the output is not from echo "${num2}". Like the diagnostics already tell you, this variable is empty.
The general syntax of shell scripts is
[ variable=value ...] command parameters ...
which will assign value to variable for the duration of command, then restore its original value. So the pipeline you are running temporarily sets num2 to the empty string (which apparently it already contained anyway), then runs the pipeline without storing the output anywhere (such as, I imagine you expected, in num2).
Here is a fixed version of your script, with the additional change that the Awk scripts handle stuff you used grep and head and wc for. Because the functionality of these commands is easily replaced within Awk, using external utilities is doubtful (especially so for grep which really is useless when you just run it as a preprocessor for a simple Awk script).
countnmon () {
ps -ef | awk '/[n]mon/ { ++n } END { print n }'
}
declare -i a=1
echo "The number of NMON instances running in Performance VM"
countnmon
echo "---------------------------------------------"
num2=$(countnmon)
#num1=${num2%%.*}
#num2 = $(countnmon)
echo "---------------------------------------------"
echo "${num2}"
while [ "$a" -lt "$num2" ]
do
kill -USR2 $(ps -ef | awk '/[n]mon/ { print $2; exit }')
a=`expr $a + 1`
done
The repeated code could be refactored even further to avoid all code duplication but that will somewhat hamper the readability of this simple script so I have not done that.

Answer 2

Whitespaces matter in bash.
The syntax for command execution is:
command arg1 arg2 ...
So,
var = value # command: var, arg1: =, arg2: value
There's are two exceptions to this rule
exporting variables to an executed command (the variables vanish after the command finishes):
var1=value1 var2=value2 .. command arg1 arg2 ...
assigning a variable (you want this one):
var=value