How to i find out the server specs in unix

I'm not sure I understand your question, since I think 'cut' will work just as you want it to.

someString="Hey there"

case `echo $someString | cut -c1-5` in
    "Hey t") echo Do something ;;
    "Go aw") echo Do something else ;;
    *) echo String is unrecognized ;;
esac

top is a good tool (if its installed), but the other one I like for a real quick look to see if anything is wrong is dmesg. That should let you know if the server's experiencing something incredibly major (disconnected nics, disk faults, memory faults etc).