I have a script that runs to create a user account. I need the script to transfer the characters from lower case to upper case. The script acts very strangely. When I put in my input --> testuser it translates the entry to teLtuLer. by taking the 's' and making them upper case 'L'. What the??

Here is the script:

prompt_info()
{
echo "Enter NEW User ID (max 8 characters) --> \c"
read userid
export userid

echo "Userid for Unix: $userid"
USERID=`echo $userid | tr [a-z] [A-Z]`
echo "Userid for Oracle: $USERID"

echo "Press anykey to continue... \c"
read anykey
}

Here is the output on screen:
Enter NEW User ID (max 8 characters) --> testuser
Userid for Unix: testuser
Userid for Oracle: teLtuLer
Press anykey to continue...

I am really confused...

Thanks
-Tim

Try this,
USERID=`echo $userid | tr abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ`

On my SCO-Unix it works in this form

Here is the output on my screen:

Enter NEW User ID (max 8 characters) --> qwertasdfgyxcvb
Userid for Unix: qwertasdfgyxcvb
Userid for Oracle: QWERTASDFGYXCVB
Press anykey to continue...

Thanks...that worked great!!

Are you sure you're using the square brackets correctly there? Try "man tr"...

And well you might be!

[a-z] and [A-Z] are file expressions which your shell will glob out and expand if it finds any matching filenames in your working directory.

You can see what the shell is passing as tokens to tr by using echo.

e.g.

mkdir new; cd new; touch a b c; echo [a-z] [A-Z]

>>> a b c [A-Z]

If you don't want the expressions expanded before they are passed to tr, wrap the whole lot in single quotes, each individual token in double quotes or do away with the square brackets (because a-z is not a file expression whereas [a-z] is!)

tr '[a-z] [A-Z]'
tr "[a-z]" "[A-Z]"
tr a-z A-Z

I'm sure there are situations where you might want to use any one of the above methods depending on how 'clever' you're trying to be at the time.

HTH