Hi,
how do you move through a mixed string of characters and perform an action on each one? e.g if you do $ ls -l file ..then the result is one row with the permission string at the start ( a mix of letters and '-'s ) how would I move through each character of the permission string and assign it a new value and put in a new file. I have spent a worrying amount of time on this problem and this is the closest I can get...

count=1
ls -l file | while read str
do
until [ $count -eq 10 ]
echo "$str" £count >> newfile
count=`expr $count + 1`
done
done

and this is just my attempt to put the position number after each of the first ten characters!! and it doesnt work.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

IMO, the best way to cycle thru a string is to use the unix cut command:

#!/bin/sh

count=0
ls -l file | while read str
do
until [ $count -eq 10 ]
do
count=`expr $count + 1`
char=`echo $str|cut -b"$count"`
echo $char
done
done

That works perfectly - thanks very much for you help.