KSH - Character Replacement

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hey all.

Easy question.

I have a (ksh) varaible x. It contains the following (for example): N557788

I want to replace the "N" with a "-".

I've done this before but for the life of me I cannot remember how I did it.

Thanks.

mtw

2

I had an epiphany! (actually I just remembered what I had done earlier)

This is what I was looking for; nice and simple:

x=`print $4 | sed 's/N/-/'`

With $4 being passed in from another script which is N557788...

Thanks.

3

You can do it all in shell
(without calling external utilities, like sed for example), but it depends on your ksh version.
Is N in fixed or variable position?
One or many occurrences?

With ksh93(dtksh on Solaris):

$ print ${.sh.version}
Version M 1993-12-28 r
$ v="N557788"
$  print -- ${v/N/-}
-557788

For older versions of ksh the solution depends on the answers of the above questions.