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

Using sed:

echo 000498 | sed "s/^0*\([1-9]\)/\1/;s/^0*$/0/"
498
echo 000 | sed "s/^0*\([1-9]\)/\1/;s/^0*$/0/"
0