07-25-2005
sed and awk wont work if the character you've got isn't on the first line of the file.
If you have GNU text utiliities installed you can do it using the versions tail and head in the distribution.
head -c 4 yourfile.txt | tail -c 1
If you wanted the 4th charcter for example. However this counts carriage returns and spaces as characters. If you want to ignore spaces and/or carraige returns you can do it but its a little more complicated.
It would be easy if you have access to perl:
cat youfile.txt | perl -e 'read(STDIN,$data,4); print substr($data,-1);'
again gives your the 4th character.
Sean
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cat(1) General Commands Manual cat(1)
Name
cat - concatenate and print data
Syntax
cat [ -b ] [ -e ] [ -n ] [ -s ] [ -t ] [ -u ] [ -v ] file...
Description
The command reads each file in sequence and displays it on the standard output. Therefore, to display the file on the standard output you
type:
cat file
To concatenate two files and place the result on the third you type:
cat file1 file2 > file3
To concatenate two files and append them to a third you type:
cat file1 file2 >> file3
If no input file is given, or if a minus sign (-) is encountered as an argument, reads from the standard input file. Output is buffered in
1024-byte blocks unless the standard output is a terminal, in which case it is line buffered. The utility supports the processing of 8-bit
characters.
Options
-b Ignores blank lines and precedes each output line with its line number.
-e Displays a dollar sign ($) at the end of each output line.
-n Precedes all output lines (including blank lines) with line numbers.
-s Squeezes adjacent blank lines from output and single spaces output.
-t Displays non-printing characters (including tabs) in output. In addition to those representations used with the -v option, all tab
characters are displayed as ^I.
-u Unbuffers output.
-v Displays non-printing characters (excluding tabs and newline) as the ^x. If the character is in the range octal 0177 to octal 0241,
it is displayed as M-x. The delete character (octal 0177) displays as ^?. For example, is displayed as ^X.
See Also
cp(1), ex(1), more(1), pr(1), tail(1)
cat(1)