topic Re: cut specific characters in Operating System - HP-UX

cut specific characters

ivywong1 — Tue, 24 May 2011 10:08:47 GMT

I would like to use a script to cut a string from a file ( test.txt ) , cut the string on line 2 , from the second character , cut 3 characters from it , the result should as "ran" , can advise how to do it ? Thanks

$vi test.txt
apple
orange
pine
banana

Re: cut specific characters

kemo — Tue, 24 May 2011 10:24:18 GMT

Re: cut specific characters

Mel Burslan — Tue, 24 May 2011 13:45:29 GMT

or

sed -ne "2,2p" test.txt|cut -c 2,4

if you want to assign it to variable to use it later

MYVARIABLE=$(sed -ne "2,2p" test.txt|cut -c 2,4)

$() construct is the newer and more appropriate form of the command quoted in backticks. FO the time being, both work the same way.

Re: cut specific characters

Jean-Philippe Henry — Wed, 25 May 2011 10:10:26 GMT

Hello,

awk 'NR == 2 { print substr ( $0, 2, 3 ) }' test.txt

Cheers

Jean-Philippe

Re: cut specific characters

Dennis Handly — Sat, 28 May 2011 08:36:55 GMT

>Jean-Philippe: awk 'NR == 2 { print substr($0, 2, 3) }' test.txt

You may want to optimize this by adding "exit" so you don't read all zillion lines of the file:
awk 'NR == 2 { print substr($0, 2, 3); exit }' test.txt