Shell Programming and Scripting

Hello

is there a way to delete all symbolic characters using the tr command
or delete everything apart from letters

for example

Code:

input="u;'#n][i.,x/"
input=$(echo $input | tr -d __what do i put here__)
echo $input

i would like echo $input to be "unix"

or a way to only accept letters

PLEASE HELP

Hi,

Here a way using 'perl':

Code:

$ echo "u;'#n][i.,x/" | perl -lape 's/[^[:alpha:]]*//g'
unix

Regards,
Birei

Code:

tr -cd '[:alpha:]'

[:alpha:] specifies all letters. -c complements that, which means everything that is NOT a letter. -d for delete. The alpha class is quoted to protect it from the shell (a posix-like shell will try pathname expansion on the bracketed word).

Read your friendly neighborhood tr man page for more info.

Regards,
Alister

Thats it
SOLVED

THANK YOU VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY MUCH

Hi,

-l -> Set line-end processing. Remove it, process line and add it again
-a -> Split line into an array (not neccesary in this case, you can omit it)
-p -> Print line to output
-e -> Enter line of script.
s/[^[:alpha:]]*//g -> Substitute all not alphabetic characters with nothing (remove them of input line). '*' char means to find contiguos ones and 'g' to do it several times until end of input.

Regards,
Birei