Simple Find in Unix

macgilli

Sorry for the simplicity of this post, but I'm adjusting an old Korn Shell script and looking for a Unix command similar to strpos command in php.

I've played around a bit with sed, awk, and grep but can't get it to work quite right.

All I really need is to determine if 'needle' is in 'haystack' where needle and haystack are variables within the script. It's so simple that it has me stumped. I don't even need to know the location of needle.

Any advice for a non unix script writing fellow?

needle="abc"
haystack="zxcabciuy125mmm"

if [ functionneeded($needle,$haystack) > 0];then
#... do stuff
else

... do other stuff

Many thanks,
A

dalecosp

Well, my first thought was simply "grep". 😃

Which goes to show that I've not got much on you, I suppose....

Have you tried rewriting the ksh script into PHP? I'm loving the PHP CLI for the same types of jobs as many folks use /bin/sh or bash.....

LordShryku

Sounds like you don't actually need the postition, just to see if it's in there.

#!/bin/ksh
haystack=1234zipper43231
needle=zip
if [[ $haystack = *$needle* ]]
then
  echo "Found \"$needle\" in \"$haystack\"."
else
  echo "Didn't find \"$needle\" in \"$haystack\"."
fi

macgilli

Thanks for the replies guys.

I've given the
if [[ $haystack = $needle ]]

a try without success. I've had to use a single [ ] pair though. I've tried some variants such as . . .
if [ "$haystack" = "$needle" ]
if [ "$haystack" = "$needle" ]

without success. This is all needed on a Windows NT box with MKS toolkit, so it's not a true *nix machine. It's not my server either and PHP is not installed (what are they thinking? - I don't know). It's all to support some legacy systems.

Not to worry, as I've been using the following which seems to work although I'm sure there is a better way:

.
.
ISREPRINT=echo $MYFILE | grep "BIL" | wc -l | sed "s/ *//g"
if [ "$ISREPRINT" = 0 ];then
.
.
where $MYFILE is the Haystack and "BIL" is the needle.

Thanks for the posts though.