Question

I’ve got a shell script outputting data like this:

1234567890  *
1234567891  *

I need to remove JUST the last three characters ” *”. I know I can do it via

(whatever) | sed 's/\(.*\).../\1/'

But I DON’T want to use sed for speed purposes. It will always be the same last 3 characters.

Any quick way of cleaning up the output?

Answer 1

Assuming all data is formatted like your example, use ‘cut‘ to get the first column only.

cat $file | cut -d ' ' -f 1  

or to get the first 10 chars.

cat $file | cut -c 1-10