how to remove last character of a string

[ghostdog74]

I have a file of many words that looks something like this:

word1
word2
word3
etc

each word is a different length, and they all seem to have a trailing space (or some sort of non-printable character). Whats the easiest way to strip the last character (the space) from each line?

awk '{sub(/ +$/,"",$0)}1' file > newfile

[onbongos]

you can strip any last character with just string[:-1]

[TeckniX]

could you provide an example of how you'd use

string[:-1]

I'm trying to remove the * from an executable filename when doing an ls -l

[ghostdog74]

could you provide an example of how you'd use

string[:-1]

I'm trying to remove the * from an executable filename when doing an ls -l

how does your file name look like ?

[stylishpants]

could you provide an example of how you'd use

string[:-1]

I'm trying to remove the * from an executable filename when doing an ls -l

Maybe you don't need to remove the last char at all.
It's possible that you're getting the trailing * on some files because your "ls" command has the "-F" option, which appends a filetype classifier character to the filename.

This may be the case even if you are not explicitly providing the "-F" yourself, often ls gets aliased to something that has some useful default options.

Try using "\ls -l" (ls with a leading backslash) to get an unaliased ls, and see if that solves your issue.

[mssever]

could you provide an example of how you'd use

string[:-1]

I'm trying to remove the * from an executable filename when doing an ls -l

You shouldn't be parsing the output of ls in the first place. ls is designed for human readers; it's impossible to reliably parse its output regardless of which options you pass to it because you can't always tell where filename boundries are. Remember, a filename can contain ANY whitespace character, including \n. Instead, use your language's facility for handling filenames. E.g.,

#Bash
for i in *; do
  # do stuff
done

#Ruby
Dir.open(some_dir) do |dir|
  dir.each do |file|
    next if file =~ /^[.]+$/
    # do stuff
  end
end

[Wybiral]

What language was this supposed to be in anyway?

[Mickeysofine1972]

Indeed, tell us what language and we will be glad to help

MIke

[ghostdog74]

he is doing a ls -l. I am certain that's not a shell command.

[toxygen]

sed -ie 's/.$//' filename