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)