Getting at the first char of a string in Bourne shell

[Scott Yelich]

>I don't think the Bourne shell can do this without executing
>an external command.

Uh, it CAN be done... the question is whether you want to fork another
process or have a massive hack to accomplish something which is
actually a minimal function (Lets pass a lisp function to get the
first letter to emacs... etc).

As an EXAMPLE only, and an example which YOU can expand...

STRING="STRING"
set +F
case "$STRING" in
  S* ) FIRST=S;;
esac
echo "The first letter of \`\`$STRING'' is \`\`$FIRST\'\'

Now, do you REALLY want to do this?
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 Scott D. Yelich                         scott@[xanth.]cs.odu.edu [128.82.8.1]
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