Getting at the first char of a string in Bourne shell

[Larry Wall]

In article <1308 at ncrwat.Waterloo.NCR.COM> ken at images1.Waterloo.NCR.COM (Ken Braithwaite) writes:
: I am trying to peel off one at a time the letters from a variable
: in the Bourne shell, ie from Bourne get B and ourne.
: How can I do this?

A fairly efficient way would be

    echo "Bourne" | SOMETHING | while read line; do
	...
    done

where SOMETHING is one of

    sed 's/\(.\)/\1\
    /g
    s/\n$//'

    perl -pe 'chop; s/./$&\n/g'

There are lots of other ways.

Larry Wall
lwall at jpl-devvax.jpl.nasa.gov