Shell Programming and Scripting

strip off all the characters right from the start of the literal till a space " " is encountered including the space

so what is left out is only the numeric literal

actually thats not a year tats a count.. and it may vary.. from 1 - any number...

thanks for the explanation

unless every line in the file is the same as:

text txt tt: 1909

the suggested solutions will process each line of the file almost regardless of whats in them. Can you explain better what you are trying to do? Are there other lines in the file that you want to skip?

Is the above line always in this format:

aaaa aaa aa: n

where 'a' is alpha characters (4 3 2) followed by a colon and a space and n is any number of digits

don't have to use regular expression if you are still not familiar with it. Until you are,

Code:

$s="text txt tt:    1909";
@a=split(/:/,$s);
print $a[1];