Picking a character from a word

[Juergen Wagner]

How about
	sed 's/^...\(.\).*/\1/'
which extracts the fourth character of a string read from stdin.

More general (and more ugly):
	awk '{print substr($0,4,1);}'
which allows you to pick an arbitrary substring from the lines on stdin.

If you are using this very often, I suggest to write a small C program
doing the job (string manipulation). Awk and sed are not very fast.

-- 
Juergen "Gandalf" Wagner,		   gandalf at csli.stanford.edu
Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI), Stanford CA