How to remove the last character from a bash grep output

Question

COMPANY NAME  cat file txt   grep  company name    cut -d     -f 2     outputs something like this   Abc Inc     What I want to do is I want to remove the trailing     as well  How can i do that  I am a beginner to bash  Any thoughts or suggestions would be helpful

User · Answer

you can strip the beginnings and ends of a string by N characters using this bash construct, as someone said already

$ fred=abcdefg.rpm
$ echo ${fred:1:-4}
bcdefg

HOWEVER, this is not supported in older versions of bash.. as I discovered just now writing a script for a Red hat EL6 install process. This is the sole reason for posting here. A hacky way to achieve this is to use sed with extended regex like this:

$ fred=abcdefg.rpm
$ echo $fred | sed -re 's/^.(.*)....$/\1/g'
bcdefg

User · Answer

foo  hello world  echo   foo    hello worl

User · Answer

This will remove the last character contained in your COMPANY NAME var regardless if it is or not a semicolon   echo   COMPANY NAME    rev   cut -c 2-   rev

User · Answer

I d use head --bytes -1  or head -c-1 for short   COMPANY NAME  cat file txt   grep  company name    cut -d     -f 2   head --bytes -1    head outputs only the beginning of a stream or file  Typically it counts lines  but it can be made to count characters bytes instead  head --bytes 10 will output the first ten characters  but head --bytes -10 will output everything except the last ten   NB  you may have issues if the final character is multi-byte  but a semi-colon isn t  I d recommend this solution over sed or cut because   It s exactly what head was designed to do  thus less command-line options and an easier-to-read command It saves you having to think about regular expressions  which are cool powerful but often overkill It saves your machine having to think about regular expressions  so will be imperceptibly faster

User · Answer

In Bash using only one external utility   IFS      read -r discard COMPANY NAME  lt  lt  lt    grep  company name  file txt  COMPANY NAME   COMPANY NAME

User · Answer

don t have to chain so many tools  Just one awk command does the job   COMPANY NAME   awk -F      company name  gsub          2   print  2   file txt

User · Answer

Assuming the quotation marks are actually part of the output  couldn t you just use the -o switch to return everything between the quote marks   COMPANY NAME    ABC Inc       echo  COMPANY NAME   grep -o

User · Answer

Some refinements to answer above  To remove more than one char you add multiple question marks  For example  to remove last two chars from variable  SRC IP MSG  you can use   SRC IP MSG   SRC IP MSG

User · Answer

Don t abuse cats  Did you know that grep can read files  too   The canonical approach would be this   grep  company name  file txt   cut -d     -f 2   sed -e  s         the smarter approach would use a single perl or awk statement  which can do filter and different transformations at once  For example something like this   COMPANY NAME    perl -ne   company name         amp  amp  print  1  file txt

User · Answer

I d use sed  s        eg   COMPANY NAME  cat file txt   grep  company name    cut -d     -f 2   sed  s

User · Answer

Using sed  if you don t know what the last character actually is     grep company name file txt   cut -d     -f2   sed  s        Abc Inc

User · Answer

I believe the cleanest way to strip a single character from a string with bash is   echo   COMPANY NAME   -1    but I haven t been able to embed the grep piece within the curly braces  so your particular task becomes a two-liner   COMPANY NAME   grep  company name  file txt   COMPANY NAME   COMPANY NAME   -1     This will strip any character  semicolon or not  but can get rid of the semicolon specifically  too  To remove ALL semicolons  wherever they may fall   echo   COMPANY NAME       To remove only a semicolon at the end   echo   COMPANY NAME      Or  to remove multiple semicolons from the end   echo   COMPANY NAME       For great detail and more on this approach  The Linux Documentation Project covers a lot of ground at http   tldp org LDP abs html string-manipulation html

User · Answer

I am not finding that sed  s       works  It doesn t trim anything  though I m wondering whether it s because the character I m trying to trim off happens to be a      What does work for me is sed  s    1

User · Answer

cat file txt   grep  company name    cut -d     -f 2   cut -d     -f 1

[bash] How to remove the last character from a bash grep output

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