How to Use sed to Remove the Last Character of a File

Often you may want to use sed to remove the last character in a file.

You can use the following syntax to do so:

sed '$ s/.$//' employees.txt

This particular example will remove the last character from the last line of the file named employees.txt.

Here is how this syntax works:

First, we use $ to match the last line of the file
Then, we use the s command to perform a substitution
We use . to match any character on the last line and we use $ to anchor that match to the end of the line, which allows us to specify the last character of the last line
We then replace this last character with nothing, which effectively removes it from the file

The following example shows how to use this syntax in practice.

Example: Use sed to Remove the Last Character of a File

Suppose that we have a file named employees.txt that contains the ID values for various employees at some company.

We can use the cat command to view the contents of this file:

Now suppose that we would like to remove the last character of the file.

We can use the following syntax to do so:

sed '$ s/.$//' employees.txt

The following screenshot shows how to use this syntax in practice:

sed remove last character of file

Notice that this returns the entire file with the last character removed from the last line.

Note that if you would like to save these changes to the file in-place then you can add the -i flag as follows:

sed -i '$ s/.$//' employees.txt

This will save the changes to the employees.txt file in-place.