Shell Programming and Scripting

I need your expertise anyone. I'm trying to remove part of a id # in a script. Reason, the part of the id is a underscore that is making my life impossible. I simply cannot handle all the requests and modify every single one in vi or edt. So I wanted to modify the script..

For example _1234567.RP

How would I remove just the "underscore" and nothing else ?

How would I then let it account for the rest of the 7 digits and the extension ?

Thanks
simon2000

Well in ksh (why do people NEVER reveal which language they are using?) it is easy:

Code:

#! /usr/bin/ksh
x=_1234567.RP
y=${x#?}
echo $y
exit 0

Hi Perderabo,

Could you pl explain what do # and ? after x do.

Thanx

The # says to remove a leading pattern. The ? is a pattern that matches a single character. Put them together and you are stripping off the first character.

Are the PartNumbers's in the script file or in a seperate flat ASCII file?

A quick perl script could be generated to go through the script line-by-line and remove the leading underscore by pattern.

If the PartNumbers are in a seperate flat ASCII file, sed would probably be a quick solution.

just to expand on his code.

Code:

cd path/to/files
for files in `ls`;do
     for lines in `cat $files`;do
          y=${lines#?}
          echo $y >> new.file
     done
done

or in sed

sed 's/^_//g' * >> contents_of_all_files_in_current_directory.txt

Posix shell. sorry.. /sh

thanks for the help..