ksh storing result of a command to a variable

Question

I want to store the result of a command to a variable in my shell script. I cant seem to get it to work. I want the most recently dated file in the directory.

Answer 1

You want $() (preferred) or backticks (``) (older style), rather than single quotes:

PRODUCT=$(ls -t /some/dir/file* | head -1 | xargs -n1 basename)

or

PRODUCT=`ls -t /some/dir/file* | head -1 | xargs -n1 basename`