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From: lwall@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV (Larry Wall)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.shell
Subject: Re: Getting at the first char of a string in Bourne shell
Message-ID: <9737@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV>
Date: 28 Sep 90 23:59:11 GMT
References: <1308@ncrwat.Waterloo.NCR.COM>
Reply-To: lwall@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV (Larry Wall)
Organization: Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA
Lines: 23

In article <1308@ncrwat.Waterloo.NCR.COM> ken@images1.Waterloo.NCR.COM (Ken Braithwaite) writes:
: I am trying to peel off one at a time the letters from a variable
: in the Bourne shell, ie from Bourne get B and ourne.
: How can I do this?

A fairly efficient way would be

    echo "Bourne" | SOMETHING | while read line; do
	...
    done

where SOMETHING is one of

    sed 's/\(.\)/\1\
    /g
    s/\n$//'

    perl -pe 'chop; s/./$&\n/g'

There are lots of other ways.

Larry Wall
lwall@jpl-devvax.jpl.nasa.gov