How to remove last n characters from a string in Bash?

Question

I have a variable var in a Bash script holding a string, like:

echo $var
\"some string.rtf\"

I want to remove the last 4 chara

Answer 1

What worked for me was:

echo "hello world" | rev | cut -c5- | rev
# hello w

But I used it to trim lines in a file so that's why it looks awkward. The real use was:

cat somefile | rev | cut -c5- | rev

cut only gets you as far as trimming from some starting position, which is bad if you need variable length rows. So this solution reverses (rev) the string and now we relate to its ending position, then uses cut as mentioned, and reverses (again, rev) it back to its original order.