Quote:
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I understand this will return the final character of the $file variable.
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Just to be clear, we are talking about returning the first or final character of a file, and does not matter if it is referenced by actual name or the filename is contained in a variable. Returning portions of what is currently held in a variable is very common, but I think not what we want here.
OK, so
head -1 myfile gets you the first line. Now pipe that into a command that will cut the first column out. But if the first line is empty, this solution results in null:
Code:
char1=`head -1 myfile | cut -c1`
echo "first character is $char1"
