Shell Programming and Scripting

Assuming you know the syntax - and the guy modifying the script after you also knows

There is always a trade off. I often do C code optimizing for others. Optimized C usually looks nothing like what you might think it ought to be -- things like Duff's machine, for example.
I always leave the old understandable stuff behind, buried in comments. For the next guy.

If ksh were truly simple to learn then why did HP(?) come up with keysh? ugh....

Don't get the wrong idea - I use ksh - but put things like expr in production code so it's maintainable. If you're doing so much string substitution that expr is a performance drain, then the code should be in C or perl, not ksh. I think.

Thanks a lot for your help with this.

Hi,

I need to find the last character of a string. I am using the same code as Perderabo suggested.

I am trying to get the last character 1 in the string mentioned in the code

for this i am trying something like this:

str="fortest_rev_1_1.csv"
strlen=${#str}
strlen1=`expr $strlen - 4`
s=$str|cut -c1-$strlen1
lastchar=${s#${s%?}}
echo $lastchar

I am using bash. The problem is that it does not throw any error neither displays the result. Am i doing anything wrong here.

Help is appreciated

You added a lot of stuff that I didn't have. Your addition does not look legal. I can't guess what it's supposed to do. What are you actually trying to do?

I think using "grep" is much easier to implement. The following bash script will ask you for a string, and add a "/" to the string if the string is not end with a "/".

Code:

#!/bin/bash

echo -n "Enter path: "
read p
if [ "$p" = "" ]; then exit; fi
if [ `echo "$p" | grep "[^/]$"` ]; then p="$p/"; fi
echo "$p"