More script help?

[Greg Stark_1]

We have a file in which we would like to parse out lines in which the first character is the letter s. I have written the script below which works, but I was wondering if there is a better/shorter way to do this.

cat $file |while read line
do
fstchar=`echo $line |cut -c1-1`
if [[ $fstchar = "s" ]];
then
echo "$line"
fi
done

Also, I noticed that if I didn't enclose the last echo variable in "'s, it would strip all white space. Why?

Thanks again,
Greg

[Rodney Hills · Accepted solution]

grep is ideal for this...

grep "^s" $file >all_lines_with_s

-- Rod Hills

[Sridhar Bhaskarla]

Hi Greg,

grep "^s" your_file

If there are no white spaces before the line this will not work. It will be complicated with sed's or the way you are doing.

-Sri