who do I do a substr ?

[Kamran Hussain]

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 ?

[Jeff Schussele · Accepted solution]

Hi Kamran,

Try this

echo $X | cut -c 1-3

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

HTH,
Jeff

[Kamran Hussain]

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.

[curt larson_1]

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/'

[H.Merijn Brand (procura]

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

[Scott Williams_5]

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