Hi all,

After using the command "du -s $dir" to put the total size of a directory into a variable I want to strip the directory size out of the variable and loose the accompanying directory path.

To do this I've been trying to compare each character until I find the space between directory size and path and then ignore everything after it

When I compare the individual characters of a variable with " " (space) I find that any time a 0 (zero) appears it matches the " " (space). I think I should be able to use the ASCII character code for space, chr(32) to do the comparison but I don't know the syntax to allow this.

The command I'm using is simply: -

if [ "${char1}" -eq "${test}" ] ; then

where ${char1} is the first character of the variable and ${test} is the character against which it is compared.

Can anyone tell me how to do this?

Thanks

In bash there are different ways to manage ASCII codes. The echo command with option -e recognizes octal sequences, for example
prints out the character W. You can also assign a character to a variable given its octal code, for example
will assign the character W to the variable var, or you can use this syntax directly in comparisons.

Anyway, for your specific problem you can simply do something like