Dear Grzegorz, Thanks for your helpful reply.
Grzegorz Adam Hankiewicz wrote:
On 2006-12-27, Richard Neill <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:1)substr support for a negative length argument. For example, stringZ=abcdef echo ${stringZ:2:-1} #prints cde i.e. ${string:x:y} returns the string, from start position x for y characters. but, if x is negative, start from the right hand side and if y is negative, print up to the end, -y. This would work the same way as PHP, and be extremely useful for, say, removing an extension from a filename.If extension removal is all you need, you can already do it. $ for f in *; do echo $f; done Makefile.am Makefile.in ucl $ for f in *; do echo ${f%.*}; done Makefile Makefile ucl
I did know about this, but it seems slightly like a sledgehammer on a nut, using a regexp instead of a substring. Also, this way doesn't allow you to trim both the start and the end. Lastly, I just think it would be a really useful (and easy-to-implement, I think) feature, which is consistent with the use of PHP and perl. At the moment, the first parameter may be any integer (postive or negative), but the second parameter can only be positive.
Best wishes, Richard _______________________________________________ Bug-bash mailing list Bug-bash@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-bash
