Dave Kelly <daveekelly@earthlink.net> writes:

> I need only the first 12 character of the 3 word. This word is not
> guaranteed to be 12 character long. This is where I'm stuck.

That's pretty ugly but works on ny POSIX shell and does not require
external aplications (thus fork + exec):

while [ $#WORD -gt 12 ]; do WORD="${WORD%?}"; done

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