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Article #1292

Re: Getting at the first char of a string in Bourne shell

#1292
From: Scott Yelich
Date: Mon, 01 Oct 1990 03:21
27 lines
1795 bytes
>I don't think the Bourne shell can do this without executing
>an external command.

Uh, it CAN be done... the question is whether you want to fork another
process or have a massive hack to accomplish something which is
actually a minimal function (Lets pass a lisp function to get the
first letter to emacs... etc).

As an EXAMPLE only, and an example which YOU can expand...

STRING="STRING"
set +F
case "$STRING" in
  S* ) FIRST=S;;
esac
echo "The first letter of \`\`$STRING'' is \`\`$FIRST\'\'

Now, do you REALLY want to do this?
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 Scott D. Yelich                         scott@[xanth.]cs.odu.edu [128.82.8.1]
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From: scott@tab00.larc.nasa.gov (Scott Yelich)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.shell
Subject: Re: Getting at the first char of a string in Bourne shell
Message-ID: <SCOTT.90Sep30232141@tab00.larc.nasa.gov>
Date: 1 Oct 90 03:21:41 GMT
References: <1308@ncrwat.Waterloo.NCR.COM> <9737@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV>
 <1990Sep29.193617.25752@iwarp.intel.com>
 <1990Sep29.215559.25098@cti-software.nl>
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In-Reply-To: pim@cti-software.nl's message of 29 Sep 90 21:55:59 GMT