How to get string without the last N characters?

Question

If I have a bash string in a variable. How do I extract/retrieve that string except for the last character, and how easy would it be if I want to extract until the last two characters?

Example:

# Removing the last character
INPUT="This is my string."
# Expected output "This is my string"

# Removing the last two characters
INPUT="This is my stringoi"
# Expected output "This is my string"

score 7 · Answer 1 · answered Oct 22 '19 at 14:33

7

With any POSIX shell:

OUTPUT="${INPUT%?}"  # remove last character
OUTPUT="${INPUT%??}" # remove last two characters
                     # and so on

answered Oct 22 '19 at 14:33

oguz ismail

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score 5 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 22 '19 at 14:34

5

Sample:

INPUT="This is my string."
echo $INPUT |sed 's/.$//' # removes last character

INPUT="This is my stringoi"
echo $INPUT |sed 's/..$//' # removes last two character

answered Oct 22 '19 at 14:34

Sreejith

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3
19

2

Maybe you should also show an example with intervals like `s/.\{3\}$//` – oguz ismail Oct 22 '19 at 14:39
Yes, the same will also work, Thanks for notifying..!! @oguzismail – Sreejith Oct 22 '19 at 14:49

RavinderSingh13 · Answer 3 · 2019-10-22T15:15:20.720

EDIT: Adding a generic solution here. You can mention number of characters which you want to remove from end of line in awk named remove_char and it should work accordingly then.

awk -v remove_char="2" '{print substr($0,1,length($0)-remove_char)}' Input_file

Could you please try following.

awk '{print substr($0,1,length($0)-1)}' Input_file

2nd solution: making field separator none with GNU awk

awk 'BEGIN{FS=OFS=""} {NF--} 1' Input_file

How to get string without the last N characters?

3 Answers3