[wellylug] BASH scripting help required

[David Antliff]

On Fri, 7 May 2004, Jamie Dobbs wrote:

> I have a script that does some file manipulation then sends a file out of
> the serial port.
> Each file is reference as $file (via a for 'file in <filespec>' type setup).
> What I need to do is to be able to test on the first character of the
> filename and process something accordingly - ie. if the first character is
> 'L' then do one thing, if it is 'P' do another etc. My skills at string
> manipulation in Unix/BASH are terrible (at best) and I wonder if someone
> caqn give me some pointers on how to do this.

Sounds like the perfect excuse to learn some basic Perl :)

One (of many) ways to do this is:

if ($file =~ /^L/) {
  ...
} elsif ($file =~ /^P/) {
  ...
}

Perl is *really* good at string manipulation.

Cheers,
David.