How can I strip first X characters from string using sed?
Here's a concise method to cut the first X characters using cut(1)
. This example removes the first 4 characters by cutting a substring starting with 5th character.
echo "$pid" | cut -c 5-
The following should work:
var="pid: 1234"
var=${var:5}
Are you sure bash
is the shell executing your script?
Even the POSIX-compliant
var=${var#?????}
would be preferable to using an external process, although this requires you to hard-code the 5 in the form of a fixed-length pattern.