Shell Programming and Scripting

Ok say I wanted to count every Y in a data file.
Then set Y as my delimiter so that I can separate my file by taking all the contents that occur BEFORE the first Y and store them in a variable so that I may use this content later on in my program. Then I could do the same thing with the next Y's that are within the contents of my file.
q=`grep -c "Y" file`

What I am really trying to do is break apart the contents of a string and set my delimiter as the character that separates my string with other parameters within the same string ( * is my delimiter ) Is there a way to find out at which position a specific character is located at in a specific string?
For Example,

Lets say I do a character count of a, which is 11... now what I was thinking about doing is I could count the characters before my * and then set that equal to a variable of some sorts... hmm

a="hello*there"
I want to find out where the * is.

(This is me just playing with unix shell, I hope someone understands my gibberish! )

Code:

$ A="hello*there"
$ B=${A#*\*}
$ echo $((${#A}-${#B}))
6

Not quite sure what you are looking for, but here are two awk programmes that list the offset of the first splat (*) in each record, and one that counts the number of splats in the file:

Code:

# present the offset of first splat
# you can use index() on any variable; $0 is the whole input line
awk '
   {
        printf( "(%s) * is character %d\n", $0, index( $0, "*" ) );
   } ' <input-file

#count number of splats in the file
# uses splat as the field separator (-F) and assumes that number of fields
# less one per line is the number of splats per line. 
awk -F "*" '
        { count += (NF - 1 ); next }
        END { print count}
' <input-file

The grep -c command will count lines, not the number of characters. The way you worded your post you want to count all characters not just the number of lines containing that character.

Hope this gives you something to work with.

short way:

Code:

tr -dc 'a' < inputfile | wc -c

tr -dc 'a' deletes every character that is not an 'a'.

An example of your input and required output would help reduce the amount of guessing we are doing here.

This is one way to split a string into two pieces ("my string" and "other parameters") with '*' as the delimiter character:

Code:

STR1="$(echo $STRING | cut -f1 -d'*')"
STR2="$(echo $STRING | cut -f2 -d'*')"

Is this what you need?:

Random string:

Code:

TEST="sdfsdfsdf*asdfsafsfsad*asdfsafsdf*asdf"

Separator: *

Code:

IFS='\*'

Code:

Code:

echo $TEST | while read LINE; do print "$LINE"; done | tr " " "\n"

Result:

Code:

sdfsdfsdf
asdfsafsfsad
asdfsafsdf
asdf

Or, a file:

Code:

cat /tmp/b
dfsdfsdfsdaf*asdfsadf
asdfsadfsadf
asdfsad*
*
asdfsdf*asdf

Code:

Code:

cat /tmp/b | tr '\*' '\n' | while read LINE; do print "$LINE"; done

Result:

Code:

dfsdfsdfsdaf
asdfsadf
asdfsadfsadf
asdfsad



asdfsdf
asdf

You can easily save $LINE inside the loop.
Tested on AIX and HP-UX; ksh93 and ksh88.