Shell Programming and Scripting

Ow that is right you must have ksh88. Then it will not work. You do not happen to have /usr/dt/bin/dtksh on your system or /bin/ksh93 ?

Thanks everyone for the responses. I have tried freelong's solution and that worked for me. I will also try some of the others to see if they will fit into my design.

I am starting to see entries about ksh93(?) and I will see if I have the lastest Korn release.

Again, thanks all !

---------- Post updated at 08:20 AM ---------- Previous update was at 07:56 AM ----------

I am trying now Scrutinizer's solution and getting an error. I am running ksh93.

num=${DDNAME:3:2}
if [[ $num =~ [0-9]+ ]]
then
echo "$num is numeric"
else
echo "$num is NOT numeric"
fi

Error: ./kwb006[29]: 0403-057 Syntax error at line 32 : `=~' is not expected.

It should work. What version of ksh93 are you using?

Code:

echo ${.sh.version}

It did not work. But, on first line I use /bin/ksh. So, I added /bin/ksh93:

VersionM-12/28/93e

Should I start my Korn shell scripts with ksh93?

If you know you can run it on all the machines that the scripts need to run on, I most certainly would. ksh88 is so eh... 1988

And ksh93 syntax is less portable.

This function tests whether its first argument is a positive integer in any Bourne-type shell:

Code:

is_int()
{
  case $1 in
     *[!0-9]*|"") return 1 ;;
  esac
}

Humm, whether your shell scripts are portable or not mostly depends on how you write your shell scripts and not on the particular shell you choose to use.

Every modern shell contains a core set of functionality which is portable across most platforms and architectures together with extended functionality which certain groups of users find useful.

Provided a shell script is written to only use the core functionality, it will generally be portable.