Another workaround is to use grep -o
with a little regex magic to get three chars followed by the end of line:
$ foo=1234567890
$ echo $foo | grep -o ...$
890
To make it optionally get the 1 to 3 last chars, in case of strings with less than 3 chars, you can use egrep
with this regex:
$ echo a | egrep -o '.{1,3}$'
a
$ echo ab | egrep -o '.{1,3}$'
ab
$ echo abc | egrep -o '.{1,3}$'
abc
$ echo abcd | egrep -o '.{1,3}$'
bcd
You can also use different ranges, such as 5,10
to get the last five to ten chars.
1. Generalized Substring
To generalise the question and the answer of gniourf_gniourf (as this is what I was searching for), if you want to cut a range of characters from, say, 7th from the end to 3rd from the end, you can use this syntax:
${string: -7:4}
Where 4 is the length of course (7-3).
2. Alternative using cut
In addition, while the solution of gniourf_gniourf is obviously the best and neatest, I just wanted to add an alternative solution using cut:
echo $string | cut -c $((${#string}-2))-
Here, ${#string}
is the length of the string, and the "-" means cut to the end.
3. Alternative using awk
This solution instead uses the substring function of awk to select a substring which has the syntax substr(string, start, length)
going to the end if the length is omitted. length($string)-2)
thus picks up the last three characters.
echo $string | awk '{print substr($1,length($1)-2) }'
You can use tail
:
$ foo="1234567890"
$ echo -n $foo | tail -c 3
890
A somewhat roundabout way to get the last three characters would be to say:
echo $foo | rev | cut -c1-3 | rev
Source: Stackoverflow.com