Substrings and the likes in AIX 4.2 ?

In AIX 4.2, are there any shell commands to do substrings and the text like manipulation commands ?

I want to take an error log where errors are multi-ligned and convert them into single lines to ease tracking/monitoring. I may need to shorten them out too.

If I can manage to put them into an Oracle table, it would even be great (other thread).

Post an example of the log file and the desired output.

Regards

As far as i remember (it has been a long time since) AIX 4.2 had only a ksh88 and no ksh93. So all the classic ${var##.....} and ${var%%....} expansions will work and the substring funcion ${var:x:y} won't because it was only introduced with ksh93.

I hope this helps.

bakunin