topic Re: who do I do a substr ? in Operating System - HP-UX

who do I do a substr ?

Kamran Hussain — Thu, 05 Dec 2002 01:01:06 GMT

variableX can be tad4 or tad

I always want the first 3 characters, so the result should always be "tad".

How do I get the first 3 characters from variableX ?

Re: who do I do a substr ?

Jeff Schussele — Thu, 05 Dec 2002 01:05:35 GMT

Hi Kamran,

Try this

echo $X | cut -c 1-3

This will return the first three characters of the variable X.

HTH,
Jeff

Re: who do I do a substr ?

Kamran Hussain — Thu, 05 Dec 2002 01:41:40 GMT

Thank you.

I knew it was an easy one; I was having the worst luck with awk:

works here:
df -k /u100 | sed '1d' | awk '{print $5}' | awk '{printf "%02d\n", $1}'

but not here !:
(given: x=tad4)
echo $X | awk '{printf "%03d\n", $1}'

Can you shed some light on the above 2 -thanks.

Re: who do I do a substr ?

curt larson_1 — Thu, 05 Dec 2002 03:47:00 GMT

with awk you should be using the %s as the conversion type in the printf statement, printf("%3s\n",$1); or using substr, printf("%s\n",substr($0,1,3);

or you could use sed, sed 's/$...$.*/\1/'

Re: who do I do a substr ?

H.Merijn Brand (procura — Thu, 05 Dec 2002 08:04:28 GMT

You can also use 'di' from http://www.gentoo.com/di/
Precompiled version available for HP-UX 11.00 and 10.20 on my ITRC site: https://www.beepz.com/personal/merijn/#Downloads
di has an option to spit out it's info in an easy to parse format.
Once used to di you never want to use df or dbf anymore

Re: who do I do a substr ?

Scott Williams_5 — Fri, 06 Dec 2002 14:50:45 GMT

If you have a variable length string, you can also use the % operator to remove a substring from the right end of a string.

>a="tadf"
>b="${a%?}"
>print $a
tadf
>print $b
tad

Scott Williams