UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi,

Sorry to take so long to get back to you, I am finally getting round to implementing the code as you suggested, but right off the bat I get the following message

UX:sh (./Iptestger): ERROR: Bad substitution

code

#! /bin/sh
while read line
do
col1=${line:0:1}
echo $col1
done < WAITING

I dont see any error in that code. Unless WAITING is not a file. You can not put in a variable in that place like that.

Edit. The shell is sh. So it should work. ksh does not have the same construct.

vino

/bin/sh on most (all?) linux distributions is a link to bash.

If you're running on just about any other UNIX type system then sh will not have the functionality described. You need to use bash itself (instead of sh).

Thanks,


I tried the below code in bash, perhaps I don't have bash on my system as I get the following error now

# ls -lt Iptestger WAITING
-rwx------ 1 root other 2118 Oct 31 12:15 Iptestger
-rw-r--r-- 1 root other 1180 Oct 31 10:53 WAITING

# ./Iptestger
UX:sh: ERROR: ./Iptestger: Not found

#! /bin/bash
while read line
do
col1=${line:0:1}
done < WAITING

# head -2 WAITING
IG405HC7 1342567SG002534181190725G52 1HP G52202 ADCR 31100511310797 C292 011198
IG405HCB 4558796SG003527361070252G52 3AW G52378 LA CHECK CYSTOSCOPY 31100572040301 M459

You can check in /usr/local/bin to see if bash is there (you'll have to change the #!/bin/bash to #!/usr/local/bin/bash of course).

If bash is not present on your system then you'll need to get hold of a copy or do it some other way

I just have these

# ls -lt /usr/bin/*sh*
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root other 271 Nov 30 2001 /usr/bin/shtty
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root other 5 Oct 19 1999 /usr/bin/rsh -> remsh
lrwxrwxrwx 1 bin bin 5 Oct 19 1999 /usr/bin/rksh -> ./ksh
lrwxrwxrwx 1 bin bin 13 Oct 19 1999 /usr/bin/restsh -> ../../sbin/sh
lrwxrwxrwx 1 bin bin 13 Oct 19 1999 /usr/bin/jsh -> ../../sbin/sh
lrwxrwxrwx 1 bin bin 13 Oct 19 1999 /usr/bin/sh -> ../../sbin/sh
-rwsr-xr-x 1 root bin 25696 Jun 4 1999 /usr/bin/remsh
-rwxr-xr-x 1 bin bin 80040 Jun 4 1999 /usr/bin/rshd
-rwxr-xr-x 1 bin bin 175948 Jun 4 1999 /usr/bin/ksh
-rwxr-xr-x 1 bin bin 7369 Jun 4 1999 /usr/bin/admrshell
-rwsr-xr-x 1 root sys 38592 Feb 26 1998 /usr/bin/shl
-r-xr-xr-x 1 bin bin 223120 Apr 2 1997 /usr/bin/csh