Bash - command substution not working

For some reason I cannot use command substitution in my bash shell in Fedora.

 
 The following commands give me the following outputs-:
  
 [Sreyan@localhost ~]$ $(( $(w| wc -l) - 2 ))
Command not found. 
 
[Sreyan@localhost ~]$ `ls`
Command not found. 
 
[Sreyan@localhost ~]$ $("date")
Command not found. 
 [Sreyan@localhost ~]$ $(ls)
Command not found. 
 [Sreyan@localhost ~]$ $(( $(date +%s) / 86400 ))
Command not found.
 

What am I doing wrong ? I cannot complete my assignments without command substitution. That's why I am posting here. I am on Fedora 14 32bit.

What is your PATH environmental variable set to?
(hint: echo $PATH )

/usr/lib/qt-3.3/bin:/usr/lib/ccache:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/home/Sreyan/bin

You do not need to put date , ls , or any other COMMAND to put in quotes when executed in a terminal.

Just like this is enough:

date
ls
w

To actualy work with them, it is suggest to echo them when encapsuled in a XY (what is this called again?).
As in:

echo $(( $(w| wc -l) - 2 ))
echo $(( $(date +%s) / 86400 ))

Because if you just call:

$(( $(date +%s) / 86400 ))

It will fail, because its result is not a COMMAND .

Furthermore (but not relevant to the post), F14 is way end of life, 21 is coming out soon.

Hope this helps

Thanks that solved my problem. Don't know what you mean by F14 though.

F14 = Fedora 14
Just saying that version 20 is out: Fedora Project - Get Fedora: Desktops, Other Formats, Spins, Cloud Images, ARM or Secondary Arches.

Cheers

I'd recommend updating tot he latest version. 14 is a very long way behind.