Wants help in shell scripting !!

[varunisac]

Hi helper,

I have a file with one line.
I want to check whether the first character is TAB or space, how can i do this...?


Please help, using "cut" wont help me as it "bypasses the tab and space characters"


Regards
Varun Isac

[Irithori]

hi and welcome.

One word beforehand: Please do not doubblepost.

As for your problem:
egrep and a characterclass will help you

man egrep
egrep '^[[:blank:]]' <FILE>

[JohnGraham]

Try looking at the output of the following:

$ od -N1 file

[andrewr]

Hi helper,

I have a file with one line.
I want to check whether the first character is TAB or space, how can i do this...?


Please help, using "cut" wont help me as it "bypasses the tab and space characters"



Regards
Varun Isac

Using BASH shell, you can execute grep, as in:

if grep $'\x09' filename; then echo "yes it's a tab and not a space"; fi

or perhaps...

if grep $'\x20' filename; then echo "yes it's a space and not a tab"; fi

if you want it to be the first character of a line that contains more than one character....

if grep -e $'^\x20' filename; then ....

And there are more possibilities if you are interested in dealing with a multi-line file. And there are more programs besides grep, eg: sed, awk, perl, php, that can do this type of matching as well.