How to extract the first two characters of a string in shell scripting?

Question

For example, given:

USCAGoleta9311734.5021-120.1287855805

I want to extract just:

US

Answer 1

If your system is using a different shell (not bash), but your system has bash, then you can still use the inherent string manipulation of bash by invoking bash with a variable:

strEcho='echo ${str:0:2}' # '${str:2}' if you want to skip the first two characters and keep the rest
bash -c "str=\"$strFull\";$strEcho;"