[wellylug] BASH scripting help required

[Michael Robinson]

On Fri, May 07, 2004 at 10:55:42AM +1200, 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.

for file in <filespec>
do
    case $file in
    [Ll]*) 
	# do L things
	;;
    [Pp]*)
	# do P things
	;;
    [Oo]*) 
	# do O things
	;;
    *)
	echo "Don't know how to handle file $file" 1>&2
	;;
    esac
done