shell (ksh) scripting question

laoisfan

Hi

Am having a problem with what seems like a trivial operation!! I know doing it in perl would be a lot easier but unfortunately this has to be done in shell (ksh)!!

Anyway, back to the problem.

I want to be able to check the first character of a word e.g

pXXXX or iXXXX
^ ^

How do I check that the word starts with a p or i ? This is wrecking my head.
Doing a google but no look so far....

Much appreciated, laoisfan

laoisfan

Hi am trying the following but not sure if it is a valid method...

$ export X=p1234
$ echo $X
p1234
$ echo $X | awk /^p/
p1234

awk prints out $X if it contains 'p' at the start

If I search for say 'i'...

$ echo $X
p1234
$ echo $X | awk /^i/
$

awk does not print anything as $X does not start with 'i'

What are people's opinions on this method?

--laoisfan

daymobrew

I got this working on Solaris 9.

#/bin/ksh

X=p1234

if [ -n "`echo $X | grep ^[pi]`" ]
then
  echo "FOUND"
else
  echo "Not found"
fi

This reports "FOUND". Works with /bin/bash too. Got an error with /bin/sh but didn't bother to find out why.

I chose grep over awk because it is a smaller binary (10k vs 83k) and therefore should load and get running faster.

laoisfan

Thanks
I will use that, wanted to use grep anyway!!

Much appreciated, laoisfan