Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi guys, I'm learning the ropes of BASH and am doing a few exercises to see if its sinking in but have gotten stuck on something I KNOW is looking at me right in the face but just isn't registering.

I'm creating a script that needs to get specific strings from a line. So using the "ls -l <filename>" command, i get a string with 6 fields (permissions and so forth). No i know there is a way to get an individual field from the 6 fields and store it but i just cant remember it. I believe its a pipe to the grep command but I'm unsure and for all i know there is an easier method.

Any help would be appreciated!

Code:

str = $(ls -l <filename>) #To get the info

now i just need to "split" the data - if it was perl, easy enough :P.

Edit: No AWK or SED.

This sounds like a homework question, try:

Code:

man cut

Regards

Indeed you could call it something like that.. Still if I'm not going to get anywhere sitting around and fiddling about then i may as well ask. Otherwise im not learning anything .. just wasting a bit of time.

Cheers non the less!

Code

str=$(ls -l <filename> | cut -d ' ' -f 1)

-d Delimiter (space in my case)
-f fields (1st one in my case)

Just a brief explanation if someone was stuck on a similar situation.

The default field separator is a space. -d will not break anything but it is not required.

I tried that however it did not work - brought up the entire line with out the option. Unix doesn't like me very much lol.

A final (i hope) question. If i had the work "command" and i wanted to split it into characters, how would i go about doing this ? See i need to be able to process each character individually using a loop however i am not aware of a command that allows me to do this.

Thanks again.

position=1

#put the following in a loop
#cut -c stands for column
while [ $position -ge 8 ]
do
echo `cut -c$position`
position=`expr $position + 1`
done

position=1
word="command"
#put the following in a loop
#cut -c stands for column
while [ $position -ge 8 ]
do
echo `echo $word |cut -c$position`
position=`expr $position + 1`
done