I am trying to extract information from a string that is surrounded by parentheses:

line="blahblah(important)" #no spaces

I thought something like
echo ${line##(*)}
would work but it doesn't. It just prints out the comlpete string.

Could anyone please help?

Probably, some regex expert can come up with a better solution, but this one works:

#!/bin/ksh

line="blahblah(important) #no spaces"

newline=$(echo "$line" | cut -d\) -f1 | cut -d\( -f2)
echo $newline

I don't do much shell scripting so I'll show the perl syntax...the key part is the regex.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

$line = q("blahblah(important) #no spaces");

print $1 if $line =~ /"(.+?)"/;

Oops, I did quotes, not parentheses.

Try this regex

/\((.+?)\)/

Cheers for the solution nails! You really hit the nail on the head! No pun intended :)
Thanks for the replies guys.