Stripping characters from a variable

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

I'm using a shell script to get user input with this command:

read UserInput

I would then like to take the "UserInput" variable and strip out all of the following characters, regardless of where they appear in the variable or how many occurrences there are:

\/"[]:|<>+=;,?*@

I'm not sure how to do that, though. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

2

How about ...

[house@leonov] input='some\/"[]:|<>+=;,?*@text' ; echo "$input" | sed 's/\W//g'
sometext
3 
>echo "stuff[]<>more" | tr -cd "[:alpha:]"
stuffmore
4

Thanks for the replies! I would still like the user input to be able to contain numbers, spaces, and other special characters like there:

`~!

5 
UserInput=$(echo "$UserInput" | tr -d '\\/"[]:|<>+=;,?*@')

Sample run:

$ UserInput='~he\/"[]:|<>l+=;,?l*@o!'
$ echo "$UserInput"
~he\/"[]:|<>l+=;,?l*@o!
$ UserInput=$(echo "$UserInput" | tr -d '\\/"[]:|<>+=;,?*@')
$ echo "$UserInput"
~hello!

Regards,
Alister

6

Thanks, alister! That's exactly what I needed! :smiley: