hello, i am a newbie who is just starting to use liunx, and I need to accept a string from the terminal and use case to echo a suitable message if the string doesn’t have at least 10 characters. Also, how would I do the same thing using expr?

expr is not really needed with bash. It is faster to use bash's built-ins. And "case" is not a great choice either. How about:

((${#var}<10)) && echo too short

thanx, that works for me as well. do you know what the script would look like using the case conditional?

echo "read input"
read str


case $((${#str}<10)) in
1)
    echo "too short "
     ;;
*)
    echo "ok now .."
    ;;