Hey,
I'm trying to print the first four characters of the hostname of a computer.

I can get it from using:
hostname -s | sed 's/...........$//'"

but this is when I know how many characters are in the computer name.

I dont understand why some like:
hostname -s | sed '/..../p'
wont work?

Any ideas?

Thanks.

hostname -s|cut -c 1-4

Thanks Mate! I have spent a number of hour trying to find this out?

Hi.
Because that sed line says: "If the incoming line has 4 characters then print it."

If you wanted to print just the first 4 with sed, you could use:

hostname -s | sed 's/^\(....\).*/\1/'

can try this also

hostname|awk '{print substr($1,1,4)}'

Thanks.

Last 4 characters how can i print

using a similar idea(s) as above......