Often you may want to use Bash to remove the first character from a string.
You can use the following methods to do so:
Method 1: Remove First Character from String Variable
my_string="${my_string:1}"
This particular example will remove the first character from the string variable named my_string.
Method 2: Remove First Character from Each String in File
cut -c2- < cities.txt
This particular example will remove the first character from each string in the file named cities.txt.
Note that this method uses the cut command to return only the characters (-c) on each line of the file starting from the second character to the last character (2-) in the line.
The following examples show how to use each method in practice.
Example 1: Remove First Character from String Variable
Suppose we have the following string stored in a variable named my_string in Bash:
- Dallas Mavericks
We can use the following syntax to remove the first character from this string:
my_string="Dallas Mavericks"
my_string="${my_string:1}"
echo $my_string
The following screenshot shows how to use this syntax in practice:
We can see that this returns the following string:
- allas Mavericks
Notice that the first character has been removed from the original string.
Example 2: Remove First Character from Each String in File
Suppose that we have a file named cities.txt in our current directory that contains the names of various U.S. cities.
We can use the cat command to view the contents of this file:
Suppose that we would like to remove the first letter from each line in the file.
We can use the following syntax to do so:
cut -c2- < cities.txt
The following screenshot shows how to use this syntax in practice:
Notice that this removes the first character from each line in the file.
If you would like to save these results to a new file then you can use the > command as follows:
cut -c2- < cities.txt > cities_new.txt
This particular example will remove the first character from each line in the cities.txt file and save the results to a new file named cities_new.txt.
Related Tutorials
The following tutorials explain how to perform other common tasks in Bash:
Bash: How to Remove Last N Characters from String
Bash: How to Get Last N Characters from String
Bash: How to Get First N Characters from String
