Extract substring in Bash

Question

Given a filename in the form someletters_12345_moreleters.ext, I want to extract the 5 digits and put them into a variable.

So to emphasize the point, I

Answer 1

A little late, but I just ran across this problem and found the following:

host:/tmp$ asd=someletters_12345_moreleters.ext 
host:/tmp$ echo `expr $asd : '.*_\(.*\)_'`
12345
host:/tmp$ 

I used it to get millisecond resolution on an embedded system that does not have %N for date:

set `grep "now at" /proc/timer_list`
nano=$3
fraction=`expr $nano : '.*\(...\)......'`
$debug nano is $nano, fraction is $fraction