Different behavour with "tr"


 
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# 1  
Old 12-05-2012
Different behavour with "tr"

I am getting different output with the 'tr' command in bash
I am using
Linux:
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 5.3 (Tikanga)
Bash version:
GNU bash, version 3.2.25(1)-release (x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu)

Code:
$ x=`echo XXx | tr '[a-z]' '[A-Z]' `
$ echo $x
XXX

$ y=`echo XXx | tr [:lower:] [:upper:] `
$ echo $y
XXx

# 2  
Old 12-05-2012
Probably a character-set thing. The GNU utilities try to abide by your character set whenever possible, and UTF8 is increasingly standard, but the definition of :lower: and :upper: for UTF8 is going to be pretty big and complicated.

Other side-effects of this compliance are things like slow-performing grep -i.

Try LOCALE="C" tr ... and see if it works as expected.

Also, if you have a file in your directory named :, l, o, w, e, r, u, or p, [:lower:] and [:upper:] will actually glob those filenames, so put them in single quotes! '[:lower:]' '[:upper:]'
This User Gave Thanks to Corona688 For This Post:
# 3  
Old 12-05-2012
Quote:
Originally Posted by Corona688
Probably a character-set thing.

...<snip>...

Also, if you have a file in your directory named :, l, o, w, e, r, u, or p, [:lower:] and [:upper:] will actually glob those filenames, so put them in single quotes! '[:lower:]' '[:upper:]'
I believe the globbing is the problem. If [:lower:] matches a filename, the lower case x won't appear in the first argument to tr and will not be converted.

The issue with locales which interleave upper and lower case letters (such as english utf-8) typically manifests as unintended conversions.

I would suggest, as you did, to quote the arguments to tr. For confirmation, set -x.

Regards,
Alister
This User Gave Thanks to alister For This Post:
# 4  
Old 12-05-2012
that explains it.
globbing was the culprit in this case. I had a file with 'w' in directory where I was executing this command. Thanks for your help !
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