Accessing the individual elements of a string assigned to a variable
As described in
Dave Taylor's column in Linux Journal, one can access the individual
characters of a string assigned to a shell variable using curly brackets and
following the variable name with a colon and the desired starting position
in the string. For example:
x=kingdom
echo ${x:3}
gdom
To limit the number of characters returned, use another colon and the number
of desired characters:
echo ${x:4:2}
do
See also the ${!x*} in the Taylor article as well as
Creating a shell variable name from a variable's value which also
makes use of ${!x} notation.
01/18/2009