How to get the last n characters of a string in Bash

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

Consider, we have the following string.

country="Portugal"

Now, we want to get the last 3 characters gal from the above string.

Getting the last n characters

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

-n is the number of characters we need to extract from the end of a string.

Here is an example:

country="Portugal"
lastThree=${country: -3}

echo $lastThree

Output:

"gal"

Note: In the above syntax space is required after the colon (:); otherwise it doesn’t work.

Similarly, you can also get the last 4 characters of a string like this:

country="Portugal"
lastFour=${country: -4}

echo $lastFour # "ugal"