How to remove the last character of a string in Bash

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

Consider, we have the following string:

name="Apple"

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

Here is an example that removes the last character e from the following string:

name="Apple"

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

echo $name # prints the string

Output:

"Appl"

In Bash 4, we can use the following syntax to remove the last character of a string.

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

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

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