How to remove the first character of a string in Bash

In this tutorial, we are going to learn about how to remove the first character of a string in the Bash shell.

Consider, we have the following string:

name="Apple"

To remove the first character from a string, we can use the syntax ${var#?} in Bash.

Here is an example that removes the first character A from the following string:

name="Apple"

name=${name%?} # removes the first character

echo $name # prints the string

Output:

"pple"

Similarly, we can also use the following syntax to remove the first character of a string.

name="Apple"
name=${name:1}
echo $name

Similarly, you can also remove the first two characters of a string like this:

name="Apple"
name=${name:2}
echo $name

Output:

"ple"