Hi,

I am running a small awk script to get the substring of
a string. But I am getting "invalid character in expression"
error. I played around with all single quotes and double
quotes but I could not figure it out.

Here is my script
File Name : test
-------------------------------
#!/bin/bash
echo $1
HEADER=`head -n 1 $1`
echo Header is $HEADER
HEADERDATE=`awk "BEGIN {print substr('$HEADER',1,5)}"`
echo $HEADERDATE

My Error
-------------------------------

[oracle@ODW3 unifi]$ ./test source*/wrapmainUPD.txt
sourcefiles/wrapmainUPD.txt
Header is HDR, Master Table Data, Date [9,10,2003]
awk: cmd. line:1: BEGIN {print substr('HDR, Master Table Data, Date [9,10,2003]',1,5)}
awk: cmd. line:1: ^ invalid char ''' in expression



Any help is greatly appreciated.


Thanks,
Modem

Hello smodem,
try this :

#!/bin/bash
echo $1
HEADERDATE=`head –n 1 $1 | awk '{
dummy=substr($1, 1, 5)
print (dummy)
}'`
echo $HEADERDATE

Greetings from Germany
Peter F.

Hi Peter,

Thanks for the solution. The script is not getting the complete string. It is getting only 4 characters. This is the output.

Script
---------------------------
#!/bin/bash
echo $1

HEADERDATE=`head -n 1 $1 | awk '{dummy=substr($1,1,10); print(dummy)}'`
echo Header Date is $HEADERDATE
HEADERLENGTH=`head -n 1 $1 | awk '{dummy=length($1); print(dummy)}'`
echo Header Length is $HEADERLENGTH


Output
----------------------

$ ./test1 source*/wrapmainUPD.txt
sourcefiles/wrapmainUPD.txt
Header Date HDR,
Header Length is 4

Thanks,
Modem.

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