How to remove last n character from string in shell script

Question

I have a variable reponame in Shell Script(bash) holding a string

echo $reponame
"testrepo.git"

I want to remove the last 4 character of this string and assign the result to a new variable repo

echo $repo
"testrepo"

How can I do this?

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/125281/how-do-i-remove-the-file-suffix-and-path-portion-from-a-path-string-in-bash — FreudianSlip, Jan 30 '23 at 06:26
_to remove last n [4] character from string in [bash] shell script_ use `echo ${reponame:0:-4}` — James Brown, Jan 30 '23 at 06:30

Newerth · Accepted Answer · 2023-01-30T06:33:39.910

If I understand correctly, you want to get rid of the .git extension. Then the correct expression would be

repo=${reponame%.*}

or

repo=${reponame%.git}

for that very specific case.

For substrings in general, the expression removing last 4 characters would go like

repo=${reponame:0:-4}

For shell in general you might use various approaches such as

repo=$(echo -n "$reponame" | sed 's/\.git$//')

or

repo=$(echo -n "$reponame" | rev | cut -f 2- -d '.' | rev)

1 Answers1