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up vote 3 down vote favorite

I would like to delete the last character of a string, I tried this little script :

#! /bin/sh 

t="lkj"
t=${t:-2}
echo $t

but it prints "lkj", what I am doing wrong? Thank you in advance!

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Unfortunately I still have this error message : "./script_max_path.sh: 15: ./script_max_path.sh: Bad substitution" –  user3581976 22 hours ago
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5 Answers

up vote 5 down vote accepted

In a POSIX shell, the syntax ${t:-2} means something different - it expands to the value of t if t is set and non null, and otherwise to the value 2. To trim a single character by parameter expansion, the syntax you probably want is ${t%?}

Note that in bash, ${t:(-2)} is legal as a substring expansion but is probably not what you want, since it returns the substring starting at a position 2 characters in from the end (i.e. it removes the first character of the string).

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up vote 2 down vote

With bash, you can do:

${var::-1}

Example:

$ a=123
$ echo ${a::-1}
12
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This works for bash version 4.2-alpha and above, too bad the version I have access to is earlier. :-/ –  h.j.k. 8 hours ago
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up vote 1 down vote

for removing the last n characters from a line that makes no use of sed OR awk:

> echo lkj | rev | cut -c (n+1)- | rev

so for example you can delete the last character one character using this:

> echo lkj | rev | cut -c 2- | rev

> lk

from rev manpage:

DESCRIPTION
The rev utility copies the specified files to the standard output, reversing the order of characters in every line. If no files are speci- fied, the standard input is read.

UPDATE:

if you don't know the length of the string, try:

$ x="lkj"
$ echo "${x%?}"
lk
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Thank you for your response! The problem is that I don't know the size of the string, and are you sure that there isn't an easier way to do it? –  user3581976 22 hours ago
    
see Updates @user3581976 –  Networker 22 hours ago
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up vote 1 down vote 
t=lkj
echo ${t:0:${#t}-1}

You get a substring from 0 to the string length -1. Note however that this substraction is bash specific, and won't work on other shells.

For instance, dash isn't able to parse even

echo ${t:0:$(expr ${#t} - 1)}

For example, on Ubuntu, /bin/sh is dash

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up vote 0 down vote

It is easy enough to do using regular expression:

n=2
echo "lkj" | sed "s/\(.*\).\{$n\}/\1/"
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