Shell script help

[Joe Robinson_2]

I am looking for a command to check if there is a form feed (^L) at the beginning of a file before continuing processing. I have one application that was written differently than all my others and I need to strip that character before using it as input to another app. It seems to me that there is a way to grep for it and explicitly look at the beginning of a line - does this seem familiar to any of you out there?

Thanks in advance,
JR

[Mark Greene_1 · Accepted solution]

The carat (^) tells grep to look at the beginning of a line:

grep "^^L" [filename]

mark

[Joe Robinson_2]

Mark,

Thanks for the tip! Just what the dr. ordered!

JR

[Rodney Hills]

If you do-

if grep -q "^L" filename ; then
echo "File has control-L"
fi

The -q option causes grep to stop on the first ^L. Otherwise grep will scan the entire file for all ^L.

My 2 cents

-- Rod Hills