remove last 4 characters from a string

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

I'm tring to remove the last 4 characters from strings in a file i.e.

cat /tmp/test
iwishicouldremovethis
icouldremovethos

so i would end up with the last 4 characters from each of the above i.e.
this
thos

I thought of using cut -c ... but I'm not sure how many characters will precede the important "Last 4 characters i need".

Thanks for your help!

2

You want to remove the last four characters or keep them?

You say remove them, then say:

Remove

sed "s/....$//" file1
iwishicouldremove
icouldremove

Keep

sed "s/.*\(....$\)/\1/" file1
this
thos
3

bash

while read -r line
do
  echo ${line:(-4)}
done < "file"
4

or AWK

awk '{print substr($0,(length($0)-3))}' FILE
5 
while read line; do
  echo ${line%????}
done < infile

---------- Post updated at 22:39 ---------- Previous update was at 22:31 ----------

awk '{sub(/....$/,"")}1' infile

---------- Post updated at 22:43 ---------- Previous update was at 22:39 ----------

rev infile23|cut -c5-|rev

:wink:

6

Enough already! You need to get out more :wink:

ps: nice!

7

Thanks :), but actually all my examples are wrong because of the OP's first sentence. Oh well... I probably should get out more :smiley:

rev infile23|cut -c-4|rev
8

Not so fast, Mr S. The question isn't clear!