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extract string with backslashes

D
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Sorry for a noob question but I have a hard time to extract a string from another string and I'm sure one of you geeks has a simple answer for this.

I have a string like "domainnameusername" that I extract from a plist using defaults read. I got the domainname with cut -d '' -f1 but I can't get the username. I tried cut -d '' -f2 and cut -d '' -f3 and cut -d '' -f2 and I always end with an empty string. I'm sure it's all about escaping but I don't know enough yet to figure this out.

Thanks,
Dirk

Best answer by tron_jones

string='domainnameusername'

username=echo $string | cut -d '' -f3

echo $username

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    3 replies

    T
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    • tron_jones
    • Contributor
    • 94 replies
    • Answer
    • March 13, 2014

    string='domainnameusername'

    username=echo $string | cut -d '' -f3

    echo $username

    D
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    • DirkM2012
    • Author
    • Contributor
    • 50 replies
    • March 13, 2014

    I knew it was easy for you.

    I tired to do everything in one line and that didn't work. Extracting the full string first to a temp variable and then using echo works perfectly. Lesson learned. Thanks!

    S
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    • sean
    • Contributor
    • 529 replies
    • March 20, 2014

    You can get echo to do all the work for you:

    #!/bin/bash

string='domainname\\username'

username=`echo ${string##*\\}`
domainname=`echo ${string%%\\*}`

echo $username
echo $domainname

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