bash, extract string before a colon

Question

If I have a file with rows like this

/some/random/file.csv:some string
/some/random/file2.csv:some string2

Is there some way to get a file

Answer 1

Try this in pure bash:

FRED="/some/random/file.csv:some string"
a=${FRED%:*}
echo $a

Here is some documentation that helps.