Question

I’m iterating over all the *.info files in a directory, and checking to see if there is a corresponding *.gz file (and removing the .info file if there isn’t). But to do this, I need to strip the .info off of $file. I’ve fiddled around with parameter substitution in bash but nothing seems to work. I can get the extension easily enough (as the code below does) but not everything but the extension. I tried various things I expected might work; none did.

for file in *.info; do
  gz_file="${file:(-4)}"                        # wrong... what is right?
  # gz_file=`echo "$file" | sed -e 's/.info//'` # easy alternative I'm trying to avoid
  if [[ ! -f "${gz_file}" ]]; then
    rm "${file}"
  fi
done

I realize this can easily be done with sed, as shown in the commented-out line, but I’d like to do it with the variable manipulation capabilities built into bash, if that’s possible, because I think it’ll be handy to have figured out how to make it work that way.

Answer 1

Did you try ${file%.*} ?
This should remove the extension.