bust up a variable

[Donny Jekels]

this might be easy to do for most, but I am having a mental block with it.

I have a variable that contains all-capps of a persons last name.

1. how do i break up the variable into variables that only contain the characters?

2. how do I change from caps to lowercase?

3. how do i capitalize the 1st character?

4. also need to comply to creating userid's from these names, where the uid must be the first 7 characters of the last name and the 1st let of the first name.

5. also some last names are less than 7 characters, in that case more charaters must be used from the first name to make up 8 characters.

in ksh please.

I have 300 user accounts to create and they provided me with lastnames in caps in first names in lowercase.

Donny

[Michael Steele_2]

Case sensitivity:

typeset -u VAR=abc
echo $VAR
ABC

typeset -l VAR=ABC
echo $VAR
abc

For putlling char's out of a string:

FOURTH=$(echo $VAR | cut -c 4)

TWO=$(echo $VAR | cut -c 2)

etc.

For question #5, about 7 or 8 chars.

Build your EIGHT VAR's and manipulate them anyway you want.

ONE
TWO
...
SEVEN = NULL?
EIGHT = NULL?

etc.

Get a copy of "The New Kornshell Command Reference " by Bolsky and Korn.

[Donny Jekels]

if I understand you correctly then, if I already have a variable with information in it and I know its CAPS, then:

LASTNAME=ANDERSON
typeset -l $LASTNAME
echo $LASTNAME
anderson

or did I loose it all together.

[James A. Donovan · Accepted solution]

To set all the last names to lower case you could also use the tr utility.

> LASTNAME=DONOVAN
> echo $LASTNAME| tr "[:upper:]" "[:lower:]"
> donovan

and if your new user's names are ina single file then you can use tr as follows:

> cat filename|tr "[:upper:]" "[:lower:]" >lowercase

and all uppercase in "filename" will be translated to lowercase in "lowercase"

...it would be
typset -l LASTNAME=ANDERSON
echo $LASTNAME
anderson

Rule #5 seems contrived to me. What happens when you eventually have a user whose first and last names combined do not total 8 characters?

[curt larson_1]

here is a quick awk script,

#!/usr/bin/ksh

fname=
lname=

print "$fname $lname" | awk '
function modname(string) {
len=length(string);
if (len>7) len=6;
fchar=toupper(substr(string,1,1));
rest=tolower(substr(string,2,len));
return fchar rest
}
{
name=modname($1) modname($2);
len=length(name);
if (len>7) name=substr(name,1,8);
print name;
}

[Donny Jekels]

Jim,

thanx for your tutorial

as for #5,
I think, one would want to use all the users last name, and oh, now I remember.

you start using charaters in the users first name.

and I guess, if the users last and first name combined is less than 8, they want it to be populated with something unique

interresting ....

[curt larson_1]

just using the shell:

#!/usr/bin/ksh

fname=
lname=

function modname {

typeset -u fchar
typeset -l rest

fchar=$(print $1 | cut -c 1)
rest=$(print $1 | cut -c 2-)

print "${fchar}$rest"
return
}

fname=$(modname $fname)
len=${#fname}
if [ $len > 7 ] ;then
fname=$(print $fname | cut -c 1-7)
fi
lname=$(modname $lname)
name="${fname}$lname"
len=${#name}
if [ $len > 8 ] ;then
name=$(print $name | cut -c 1-8)
print $name

[Donny Jekels]

jim & curt,

thanx, a million. I am ok from here on. will send you the final script for critique

10 point for both.

[curt larson_1]

to add some characters to the end:

elif [ $len < 8 ] ;then

set -A Chars a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 . /

while [ $len < 8 ]
do
num=$(($RANDOM / 512 ))
char=${Chars[$num]}
name="${name}$char"
len=${#name}
done

[Donny Jekels]

great, this is turning out to be a killer script.