uppercase first character in a variable with bash

Question

I want to uppercase just the first character in my string with bash.

foo=\"bar\";

//uppercase first character

echo $foo;

should print \"B

Answer 1

Using awk only

foo="uNcapItalizedstrIng"
echo $foo | awk '{print toupper(substr($0,0,1))tolower(substr($0,2))}'

Answer 2

first-letter-to-lower () {
        str="" 
        space=" " 
        for i in $@
        do
                if [ -z $(echo $i | grep "the\|of\|with" ) ]
                then
                        str=$str"$(echo ${i:0:1} | tr  '[A-Z]' '[a-z]')${i:1}$space" 
                else
                        str=$str${i}$space 
                fi
        done
        echo $str
}
first-letter-to-upper-xc () {
        v-first-letter-to-upper | xclip -selection clipboard
}
first-letter-to-upper () {
        str="" 
        space=" " 
        for i in $@
        do
                if [ -z $(echo $i | grep "the\|of\|with" ) ]
                then
                        str=$str"$(echo ${i:0:1} | tr  '[a-z]' '[A-Z]')${i:1}$space" 
                else
                        str=$str${i}$space 
                fi
        done
        echo $str
}

first-letter-to-lower-xc(){ v-first-letter-to-lower | xclip -selection clipboard }

Answer 3

Alternative and clean solution for both Linux and OSX, it can also be used with bash variables

python -c "print(\"abc\".capitalize())"

returns Abc