Accessing last x characters of a string in Bash

Question

I found out that with ${string:0:3} one can access the first 3 characters of a string. Is there a equivalently easy method to access the last three characters?

Answer 1

You can use tail:

$ foo="1234567890"
$ echo -n $foo | tail -c 3
890

A somewhat roundabout way to get the last three characters would be to say:

echo $foo | rev | cut -c1-3 | rev