How to get the last character of a string in Bash

In this tutorial, we are going to learn about how to get the last character of a string in Bash.

Consider, we have the following string.

place="Paris"

Now, we want to get the last character s from the above string.

Getting the last character

To access the last character of a string, we can use the parameter expansion syntax ${string: -1} in the Bash shell.

In bash the negative indices count from the end of a string, so -1 is the index of a last character.

Here is an example:

place="Paris"
lastCharacter=${place: -1}

echo $lastCharacter

Output:

"s"

Note: Space is required after the colon (:); otherwise it doesn’t work.

Similarly, you can also get the last two characters of a string like this:

place="Paris"
lastTwo=${place: -2}

echo $lastTwo # "is"