How can I delete the last character in a file. I dont care what the character is - all i want to do is delete the last character. Whats the easiest way to do this? Any help is appreciated

Hi: Here's one way: #!/bin/ksh nr=$(wc -l filename) nawk ' { if(NR nn) print $0 else { str=substr($0, 1, length($0)-1) print str } } ' nn="$nr" filename You could read the whole file into an array, but I chose to find the number of lines before processing Regards, Nails

How about: sed '$s/.$//' filename.dat

...though that will only make a difference if the last line of the file contains a character to delete. I'm not sure what you want to happen in that situation though.

Here is what I want.. I have files that contain data in this format name1, name2, name3, I just want to get rid of comma after "name3". Note each file may contain different number of records - also each record maybe of varying length..

Then the sed command should work, i.e: sed '$s/.$//' filename.dat or to be safe you could specify a literal comma rather than "any character": sed '$s/,$//' filename.dat If the final line of the file doesn't match the pattern it will have no effect, which is what I meant above. In this case it sounds like what you'd want to happen anyway.

This is great - does the job.. Let me try to get more out of this.. Here is the bigger pisture.. I have a file test.dat which contains Test.dat -------- This directory contains file.dat which is very useful. I want to get list of files from the current directory and replace the word file.dat with the list of files separated by comma So if my directory has: file1.dat file2.dat file3.dat My end result of test.dat should be test.dat -------- This directory contains file1.dat,file2.dat,file3.dat which is very useful. How can this be done? The way I think it may work is: 1. awk to get list of files serataed by comma 2. sed to delete last comma 3. perl to search and replace Is there a better/easier/another way to do it???