how do I chop of characters at the end of a line...

You could do something like this:

a="string.txt"
new_a=`echo $a | cut -f1 -d.`

new_a would then only contain "string".

On 3 Mar 2003, Entelin wrote:

> I want to take a variable say a="string.txt" and chop off the last 4
> characters so I can make variable b equal to just "string"
>
> Thanks for your help
>
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