Need help in string filtering (KSH)

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hi all,

I'm interested in printing out only the prefix of a formatted set of filenames. All files of this type have the same 8 character suffix. I'm using KSH.

Is there a command I could use to print the filenames, less the last 8 characters? Was thinking of using sed 's/<last 8 chars>//', but this would not take into the case in which the prefix is the same string as the suffix (a rare, but possible case).

Thanks in advance.

2

You could do

sed "s/<last 8 chars>$//"

or

while read file
do
  echo ${file%????????}
done < list.txt