Hello, I want to give back the first 3 letters of my hostname to a variable in a shell script like this principle: N=awk'{printf substr(`uname -n`,1,3) };{exit}' but so it doesn't work. I have one error: The statement `uname -n`cannot be correctly parsed. If I put my hostname in this line my variable havn't any result, and if I take only the awk-command I must press enter to finish it ... Can me help everyone, please? andre regards everybody, andre

N=$(uname -n | cut -c-3)

Hello Wolfbone, thanks for your answer, I think, I was a little bit blind today. It's so easy with cut and I thought, cut is only for tables ... And that I can't take every UNIX-command in awk - must pipe it to awk - I know also - sometimes ;-) But can you give me an answer of the second problem - press Enter to finish? p.e. I write awk'{printf substr(myname,1,3) }; {exit}' at the command line, then I press Enter and on screen I have a blank line. Then I press a second time Enter, and now I see the result myn# regards and thanks, schauan regards everybody, andre

Awk was looking for some input - you didn't give it a file so it opened stdin and waited for you to give it something.

In awk, the BEGIN and END sections (if present) are executed only once regardless of stdin, e.g: awk 'BEGIN {print substr("Banana",1,3) };' Also just for fun, typeset -L3 N N=$(uname -n)