[gentoo-user] OT: cut replacement with bash builtins

[Florian Philipp]

Hi list!

I'm currently streamlining some of my shell scripts to avoid unnecessary
process calls where bash itself is powerful enough.

At the moment, I want to replace stuff like this:
string='foo:bar:foo'
second_field=$(echo $string | cut -d : -f 2) # should read "bar"

My current solution is using two string operations:
string='foo:bar:foo'
# remove everything up to and including first ':'
second_and_following=${string#*:}
# remove everything from the first ':' following
second_field=${second_and_following%%:*}

Of course, I normally do this in a single line with a subshell but it
still looks cumbersome. Is there a way to do it in a single operation
without a temporary variable? The following does not work:
string='foo:bar:foo'
second_field=${string#:%%:*}

Thanks in advance!
Florian Philipp