UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi all, this is driving me nuts.
I need to evaluate if a variable in a shell script has a heading s or m character e.g. s92342394 or m9233489 if so then I need to get rid of them. I'm quite familiar with PERL and could do it there in 3 mins but I have not found a decent way to do this in a shell. And I can't use Perl for this example.

Any ideas are highly appreciated.

Thanks a ton

This is how far I got so far....

#for sem in `ipcs -s |grep dmadmin|awk '{print $2}'`
for sem in 's62464053' '53267' 's23760930' '452629'

do
#print $sem
if [echo $sem | egrep -e 's' ]
then
print $sem

else
echo "keins "
#print $sem
#ipcrm -s $sem
fi
done

Code:

for sem in s62464053 m53267 s23760930 452629; do
  case $sem in
    [sm]* ) printf "${sem#?}\n";;
        * ) printf "$sem\n";;
  esac		
done

With some recent shells (bash, ksh93, zsh):

Code:

for sem in s62464053 m53267 s23760930 452629; do
  [[ "$sem" == [sm]* ]] && 
    printf "${sem#?}\n" || 
	  printf "$sem\n"		
done

Or just:

Code:

sem=(s62464053 m53267 s23760930 452629)
printf "%s\n" "${sem[@]/[sm]}"