Bash Cookbook

How it works...

This recipe is a bit iterative, but it should re-iterate (pardon the pun) to demonstrate that Bash has a fair number of functionalities built-in to manipulate strings or any structured data. There is a basic assumption though and that is based on many OSes using C programs:

• A string is an array of characters
• Characters such as ',' are the same as any other character 
• Therefore, we can evaluate or test for the existence of a character to separate fields from lines and even use this to build arrays

Now, reviewing the steps in this recipe:

1. After running the script, we have the following output in the console:

$ builtin-str.shfirst character 1first three characters 123third character onwards 4567890asdfghjklforth to sixth ...