AIX

In optimizing and bulletproofing the scripts running on my client's AIX 4.2 (Korn shell), I will need a way to examine and/or extract informations from non field non seperated text to be used for several purposes.

How could I do the same for these situations :

ex-1:
"00000"+"1" => "00001" (5 last char)
"00000" +"12" => "00012" (5 last char)


ex-2:
"aaaaa12345aaaaa@ => "12345" (extract that part where position is known)
"aaaaa12345aaaaa@ => "12345" (extract that part where position is unknown)


ex-3:
multi-line rec (variable format + possible spaces at beginning of line)
adfadasdf(aaaa),adkalsd,
klajdf,hklajhklajh(akdjakjflkajmakfaklj),
ifuioioa(usdoiau(akljsdlkajdh),alkdjfhkajsdh)

into
adfadasdf(aaaa),adkalsd,klajdf,hklajhklajh(akdjakjflkajmakfaklj),ifuioioa(usdoiau(akljsdlkajdh),alkd jfhkajsdh)

multi-line record contains any combinations/amount of fields and any combination/amount of separators.

The ksh93 has a substring function you could use, but AIX 4.2 uses a ksh88 as the default shell and it is probably more robust to rely on that.

In this case you could use the variable expansion feature of the ksh to extract the strings:

${var%%???} gives everything except the last 3 characters of variable $var
${var##???} gives everything except the first 3 characters of variable $var
etc.

It is possible to nest these expressions to get a substring-like functionality. Have a look in a ksh book to find out more about variable expansion.

I hope this helps.

bakunin