Shell Programming and Scripting

I may not being doing this description justice, but I'll give it a try.

I created a mailx script; there will be several messages using the same script where the only difference is the content. So I figured I'd make the content of the message a variable retrieved from a separate file. I have five (5) types of message content, could I put all five in one text file and retrieve the specified message content in my message script; so that all five can reside on the same file versus on five separate files where I'd do a `cat filename.txt`?

If I didn't explain it well, please let me know.

v/r
Roy

Yes you can keep all the message in one file. You can try something like this

Code:

$ cat msg
1 Msg1
2 Msg2
3 Msg3
4 Msg4
5 Msg5
$ grep "^1" msg #To retrieve first message

Sweet, I tried this:

var1=`grep "^1" testmsg.txt`;

and it worked. But it added the leading number 1 (2, 3, so-on). If I remove the line numbering then it doesn't return the line. So I assume I'd have to truncate that line number and the space after the line number. Sorry I'm still a newbie, so how would I add the truncate in the same call?

v/r
Roy

---------- Post updated at 01:59 PM ---------- Previous update was at 12:50 PM ----------

Anyone?

How to take out the first two characters (spaces) or whatever from a string?

In this case the line looks like this: 1 text text text text;
when I grep 1 I don't want the 1 or the space after it, I just want to echo text text text.

Sorry for such a novice quetion. I did try searching but it pulls ways of doing it with slashes and the trailing part of a string.

then you can try this sed

Code:

sed -e 's/\(^1 \)\(.*\)/\2/g'

Code:

sed "s/^1 //" file

That didn't work...

Code:

var2=`grep "^3" testmsg.txt | sed -e 's/\(^1 \)\(.*\)/\2/g'`