Pro Bash: Learn to Script and Program the GNU/Linux Shell

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to APress Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2023

J. VarmaPro Bash https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-9588-5_7

7. String Manipulation

Jayant Varma¹  

(1)

Berwick, VIC, Australia

 

In the Bourne shell, very little string manipulation was possible without resorting to external commands. Strings could be concatenated by juxtaposition, they could be split by changing the value of IFS, and they could be searched with case, but anything else required an external command.

Even things that could be done entirely in the shell were often relegated to external commands, and that practice has continued to this day. In some Linux distributions, you can find the following snippet in /etc/profile. It checks whether a directory ...