Removing leading zeros before passing a shell variable to another command

Question

It turns out that iptables doesn\'t handle leading zeros too well. As $machinenumber that is used has to have a leading zero in it for other purposes, the idea

Answer 1

No, you make all (alomost all) correct. You just must:

• remove spaces around =
• use $() or backticks instead of ()

That would be correct:

 nozero=$(echo $machinenumber | sed 's/^0*//')

Also you must use variables without () around them. You can add "" if you want:

iptables -t nat -I POSTROUTING -s "10.$machinetype.$nozero.0/24" -j MASQUERADE

And of course variables here are not necessary. You can say simply:

iptables -t nat -I POSTROUTING -s "10.$(echo $machinenumber | sed 's/^0*//').$nozero.0/24" -j MASQUERADE