Position of a string within a string using Linux shell script

Question

If I have the text in a shell variable  say  a   a  The cat sat on the mat    How can I search for  cat  and return 4 using a Linux shell script  or -1 if not found

User · Answer

You can use grep to get the byte-offset of the matching part of a string:

echo $str | grep -b -o str

As per your example:

[user@host ~]$ echo "The cat sat on the mat" | grep -b -o cat
4:cat

you can pipe that to awk if you just want the first part

echo $str | grep -b -o str | awk 'BEGIN {FS=":"}{print $1}'

User · Answer

With bash  a  The cat sat on the mat  b cat strindex        x    1   2           x      1      amp  amp  echo -1    echo     x     strindex   a    b      prints 4 strindex   a  foo      prints -1

User · Answer

I used awk for this  a  The cat sat on the mat  test  cat  awk -v a   a  -v b   test   BEGIN print index a b

User · Answer

echo  a   grep -bo cat   sed  s

[linux] Position of a string within a string using Linux shell script?

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