Question

I need to extract part of the string before the last opt in the string:

NDS=/opt/novell/opt/eDirectory/opt/abc

I want just the /opt/novell/opt/eDirectory/ part

I used NDSHOME=${NDS%opt*}
but I am getting bad substitution on Solaris 10, that is using the Bourne shell,
although this script works fine on Linux and AIX.
Can somebody find a solution to this??

Answer 1

Solaris’ /bin/sh is notoriously not Posix compatible.

You could try the following workaround with sed

NDSHOME=`echo "$NDS" | sed 's/^\(.*\)\<opt\>.*$/\1/'`

Note: Normally I would use $() instead of backtics for command substitution, but I don’t think those work on Solaris either.

Edit
Changed it so that opt will not match intra-word boundaries

$ echo $NDS
/opt/novell/opt/eDirectory/opt/helicopter
$ echo "$NDS" | sed 's/^\(.*\)\<opt\>.*$/\1/'
/opt/novell/opt/eDirectory/