How to remove (cut) last n characters from strings

13/08/2013 12:26 am

Jakub Walczak

Tags: bash

Sometimes you need to cut characters from string. If you need substring starting from characters 4 it is simple:

[you@host ~]$ test="abcdefgh"
[you@host ~]$ echo $test | cut -c 4-
defgh

If you want to remove last 3 characters you can do this using:

[you@host ~]$ echo ${test:0:${#test}-3}
abcde

or

[you@host ~]$ echo $test | rev | cut -c 4- | rev
abcde

I prefer the second method.

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