RE: Recommended way to truncate a shell variable value in autoconf

[Dale Visser]

> Date: Fri, 21 Feb 2014 16:57:28 -0700
> From: address@hidden
> To: address@hidden; address@hidden
> Subject: Re: Recommended way to truncate a shell variable value in autoconf
> 
> 'string : regexp' is portable.  'match string regexp' is not.  For
> example this use of expr is already present in pretty much any configure
> file generated by modern autoconf:
> 
>     as_echo_body='eval expr "X$1" : "X\\(.*\\)"'

Good. I think I have settled on this, but will go back to the expr solution if 
you think that would be better:

X=`echo "$X" | sed 's/ .*// ' | sed 's/,.*//'`

By the way, thank you for all your help. :-)