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

If you don't have sed or awk or perl then you could use cut and grep

mn="$machinenumber"
while echo "$mn"|grep -q '^0';do mn=$(echo "$mn"|cut -c2-);done
iptables -t nat -I POSTROUTING -s 10.($machinetype).($mn).0/24 -j MASQUERADE

Works with both bash and dash shells.