Hello, I am trying to parse a string and assign the result to a variable. For example, I have a variable yymm="0809", I am passing this variable into a script. In the script, I'd like to extract the last two digits (09) of the string and assign it to a variable called "month". How do I do that, I tried awk but I couldn't get it to work. Thanks.

Probably the most simple way is to use the unix cut command. This gets the last 2 characters of argument 1: #!/bin/ksh var=$1 len=${#var} # get the length if [[ $len < 2 ]] then echo "arg 1 needs to be 2 characters" exit fi myvar=$(echo "$var"|cut -c"$((len-1))"-"$len") echo "$myvar"

bash yymm="0809" var=${yymm:(-2)}

Nails,ghostdog - Thank you for the replies from both of you. I ended up by fixing the awk command I was trying to use and I got it working. Thanks for the hints Nais.;) Here it is: month=$(echo "$1" |awk '{print substr($1,length($1)-1,length($1))}') thanks again.