I want to see if a string is inside a portion of another string.
e.g.:
'ab' in 'abc' -> true
'ab' in 'bcd' -> false
How can I do this in a conditional of a bash script?
You can use the form ${VAR/subs} where VAR contains the bigger string and
subs is the substring your are trying to find:
my_string=abc
substring=ab
if [ "${my_string/$substring}" = "$my_string" ] ; then
echo "${substring} is not in ${my_string}"
else
echo "${substring} was found in ${my_string}"
fi
This works because ${VAR/subs} is equal to $VAR but with the first occurrence of the string subs removed, in particular if $VAR does not contains the word subs it won't be modified.
