how to calculate the minimum of two variables simply in bash?

Question

I have a bash script checking the number of CPUs on the platform to efficiently use `-j` option for make, repo, etc. I use this: ``` JOBS=$(cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep processor | tail -1 | sed "s,^.*:.*$[0-9].*$$,\1,") echo -e "4\n$JOBS" | sort -r | tail -1 ``` It works fine. But, I am wondering if there was any built-in function which does the same thing (i.e. calculating the minimum, or maximum)?

Accepted Answer

If you mean to get `MAX(4,$JOBS)`, use this:

```
echo $((JOBS>4 ? JOBS : 4))
```

how to calculate the minimum of two variables simply in bash?

Solution

Problem