On Mon, 8 Oct 2007, Ralf Corsepius wrote: > On Mon, 2007-10-08 at 02:23 -0400, Robert P. J. Day wrote: > > it's late so i'm sure i'm just being dense in not knowing this, but > > is there a simpler way to check if the first character of a string is > > a "/" rather than the cumbersome: > > > > if [ "x${VAR##/*}" = "x" ] ; then ... > > > > surely there must be *something* that doesn't look quite so grotesque. > If you want it portable/bourne-shell compatible, consider "case" > > case "$VAR" in > /*) > ...;; > esac i knew about that variation, but it seemed like overkill for a simple one-character comparison. andy's version seems like the simplest solution so far. rday -- ======================================================================== Robert P. J. Day Linux Consulting, Training and Annoying Kernel Pedantry Waterloo, Ontario, CANADA http://crashcourse.ca ========================================================================