Selecting strings with - as first character in bash

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

I have a variable containing a list of strings, and want to create a string with the first character being -.

Example:

var="-name fred paul -surname winnett dimech"

I want a string, namely

errStr="-name -surname"
2

try this

errStr=`echo $var | tr  -s " " "\n" | grep - | tr "\n" " "`
3

There's no need for any external command:

var="-name fred paul -surname winnett dimech"
errStr=
for word in $var
do
  case $word in
    -*) errStr=${errStr:+"$errStr "}$word ;;
  esac
done