Sed is doing my head in! How do you remove the first character of a string?

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hello!

Please bare with me, I'm a total newbie to scripting. Here's the sudo code of what I'm trying to do:

Get file name

Does file exist?

If true
     get length of file name

     get network id (this will be the last 3 numbers of the file name)

     loop x 2

          If first character of if :=0

               delete first character
          else
               exit loop
           fi
     end loop

Currently I have:

[-f /var/named/$Server ] && flag="true" || flag="false"

if $flag
then
     echo "yey"

     length=$((${#s}-2))
     ipmid='expr substr $s $((length)) 3'

     if [ ${ipmid:0:1} = 0 ]
     then
          ????
     fi
else
echo "Something went wrong! Whoops!"
fi

exit 0

with the s variable being the user input which looks like "test001" or "testtwo010"

As you can see I'm having trouble with the sed that will chop of the first character.
I tried :

echo $ipmid | cut -c2-

but that will print the last 2 characters but not chop off the first.
Ive also tried hacking as sed with

$ipmid | sed 's/.\(.*\)/\1/'

but that just gets me an error :frowning: :o

Thanks!

Katie

---------- Post updated at 10:59 AM ---------- Previous update was at 10:16 AM ----------

fixed it, Thanks, and sorry for clogging up your threads!

If anyone is interested the solution is:

ipmid=${ipmid#?}
2

Thanks for sharing, we can the add Solved to the title for the search engines...And we always like to know how...