CSH Can't Handle Leading Zeroes

No action needed on this, but I thought RHEL users would want to know: Unlike Unix (e.g. Mac OS X), RHEL's implementation of CSH barfs on leading zeros when reading a number from a text file into a numeric CSH variable. For example, if a file contains the text "00123", then the following statement:

@ myNum =

cat $data_dir/mynum.txt

will give you the number 123 if you are running the CSH file under Unix, but Red Hat will generate a "Badly formed number" error. You can make it work in Red Hat by trimming leading zeroes, like so:

@ myNum =

cat $data_dir/mynum.txt | sed 's/^0*//'

(However, that might fail if the number is actually zero, so watch out for that.)