Member Avatar for sjgriffiths

Is there any way to check the first $NUM chars of a variable?

For example if I have a veriable which contains

VAR="LONGMORE LTD"

Can i check the first character begins with L?

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by eggi
Member Avatar for radoulov

With ksh93, bash, zsh:

[[ $VAR == L* ]]&&echo OK||echo KO

For old shells use case:

case $VAR in L*) echo OK;;*)echo KO;;esac
Member Avatar for eggi

Hey there,

If you need to be more generic (like sometimes you want to match the first 3 letters and sometimes 2, etc) you can use expr's : (colon) operator to do string and substring matching.

Hope that helps,

Mike

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