How to remove the date part of the file?

Hi Gurus,

I have file name like:

abcd.20131005.dat

I need to remove mid part of data
final name should be

abcd.dat

thanks in advance

mv `ls *.dat` `ls *.dat | cut -d"." -f1,3`

Parameter Expansion, read all about it in the manpage for your shell.

filename=abcd.20131005.dat

suf=${filename##*.}

filename=${filename%%.*}.$suf

echo $filename
abcd.dat