[qu1j0t3]

And read the bash manual at least ONCE. (It's not the man page.)

[majewsky]

But the manpage is useful in itself already: I've been using a lot of

  ${VAR:INDEX}
  ${VAR/PATTERN}
  ${VAR#PATTERN}

etc. in the last few months. It covers a lot of string processing needs in shell scripts that you would otherwise have invoke sed or awk for.