Q: Why do programmers always get Christmas and Halloween mixed up?

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Tue, Nov 02, 2010 at 08:36:20PM -0400, Walter Dnes wrote:
>   I have one or 2 personal bash scripts that I have to go out of my way
> to *PREVENT* octal.  They parse/manipulate/calculate numbers that get
> pulled in from a fixed format text file.  And leading zeros royally
> screw things up, because they switch the numbers from base 10 to base 8.
> Here's a function I use a lot...
> 
> # bash treats leading zeros as indicating octal, freaks out on
> # on 08 or 09, and numbers 010 and above are just plain wrong.
> # So strip leading zeros.
> strip_leading_0() {
>   stripped="$1"
> #
> # Leave plain "0" alone.  Only strip zeros if string is longer
> # than one character.
>   while [[ ${#stripped} -gt 1 ]] && [[ "${stripped:0:1}" == "0" ]]
>   do
>     stripped=${stripped:1}
>   done
>   export stripped
> }
> 
>   It gets called like so...
> 
> xday=${dataline:6:2}
> strip_leading_0 "${xday}"
> xday=${stripped}

Would it be simpler to just prepend 10# to the number?

For example:

y="0001234"
let "x = 10#$y"
echo $x

-- 
Len Sorensen
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