Shell Programming and Scripting

hi,

i am using the following script to get the last digit of YEAR

OY=`expr substr $YEAR 2 1`

it is showing syntax

Is this wrong or i need to change anything
I am running this in sun solaris unix

bash?

OY=${YEAR:2:2}

it shows error "bad substitution"

If you don't use bash, you can try sed:

Code:

OY=`echo $YEAR|sed 's/^..//'`

Regards

Code:

fab@adeon:~$ YEAR=1984
fab@adeon:~$ OY=${YEAR:2:2}
fab@adeon:~$ echo $OY
84
fab@adeon:~$ bash --version
GNU bash, version 3.1.17(1)-release (i486-pc-linux-gnu)
Copyright (C) 2005 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
fab@adeon:~$

Or:

Code:

% year=1984
% echo ${year#??}
84

IF something works and does what is needed, it is okay. Where you need to worry is in a production application where the code executes thousands of times, inside a loop. Then, using shell builtins is a much better choice because sed, awk, expr and so on create a child process everytime they run. The shell builtins look like ${stuff in here} and the exact syntax depends on which shell you code in. radulov showed how to do it in ksh for example.