Hi All, I am having a problem extracting part of a string into a variable using korn shell. Using the id command the following is returned and stored in a variable called userid: uid=2435(TY34955) gid=34543(systems) I need to extract the (TY34955) without the braces when the length of both the uid(the 2435) and and the(TY34955) may vary. example of desired output: TY34955 Is there a good way to do this? Thanks, Jon

You can use a two-step process where the first step removes from the beginning and the second step removes from the end: name1=${userid#*\(} name2=${name1%%\)*} Or this will pull it in one step: name2=$(expr "$userid" : ".*(\(.*\)) gid=") On HP-UX, I use this instead: name2=$(whoami)

And not nearly as efficient, but awk can pull it as the second field where fields are delimited by either left or right parentheses: name2=$(echo $userid | awk -F "[()]" '{print $2}')

There's numerous ways of doing this, here is another: #!/bin/ksh uid=$(id | cut -d'(' -f2 | cut -d')' -f1)