How to remove the first n characters of a string in Bash

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

Consider, we have the following string.

country="portugal"

Now, we want to remove the first 3 characters por from the above string.

Removing the first n characters

To remove the first n characters of a string, we can use the parameter expansion syntax ${str: position} in the Bash shell.

position: The starting position of a string extraction.

Here is an example that removes the first 3 characters from the following string:

country="portugal"
modified=${country:3}

echo $modified

Output:

"tugal"

Similarly, you can also remove the first 4 characters of a string like this:

country="portugal"
modified=${country:4}

echo $modified # "ugal"