Formatting string output in bash

[Luuk]

Is there a more elegant way to do this:

mktemp -u XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX | sed 's/\(....\)\(....\)\(....\)\(....\)/\1-\2-\3-\4/g'

This will output 16 characters with '-' signs between the output like (i.e.): EjSe-Cla4-OaT7-IR26

[Luuk]

Ok, I did find two alternative to do this:

s=; for (( i=1; i<=4; i++ )) ; do s=$s-`mktemp -u XXXX` ; done; echo ${s:1}
 

and

function abc () { mktemp -u XXXX; }; echo `abc`-`abc`-`abc`-`abc`
 

But the sed part in my original attempt...
Can I be written simpler?

[SioSio]

mktemp -u XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX | sed 's/\(....\)/\1-/g'| sed '$s/.$//'
 

Use awk. This is not elegant,

mktemp -u XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX |  awk '{print substr($0,1,4)"-"substr($0,5,4)"-"substr($0,9,4)"-"substr($0,13,4)}'
 

[Luuk]

@SioSio: a late reaction....

and if more than 2 processes are needed, i do like this one more:

uuidgen | base64 | sed 's/\(....\)\(....\)\(....\)\(....\).*/\1-\2-\3-\4/g'

[SioSio]

I recently found this thread and it's late

mktemp -u XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX | sed 's/\(....\)/\1-/g; $s/.$//'