Can't use wildcards in shell script

Question

It is about 3 days I'm struggling with

D1="`ls $g???_???_?????$DATE1`"" ` |`""` wc -l`"
       if [ $D1 -eq "0" ]

and still it ends with syntax error. The last syntax error bash tells is syntax error at line 1: `|' unexpected.

Can you please help me?

Answer 1

This is what finally worked:

D1=`ls 'a_costant_string'"$DATE1"????????"$g"* | sort -u | wc -l`

I meantion it here because it took me lots of time to find the combination that work correctly and this was actually the correct answer.

Answer 2

I'm not sure what you want to achieve. However, the pipe symbol is part of a substitution command, and not a substitution command on it's own.

D1="`ls $g???_???_?????$DATE1 | wc -l`"
if [ $D1 -eq 0 ]; then
    ...
fi