<<Anchor(faq74)>>
== How do I get the effects of those nifty Bash Parameter Expansions in older shells? ==
Most of the extended forms of [[BashFAQ/073|parameter expansion]] do not work with the older BourneShell. If your code needs to be portable to that shell as well, {{{sed}}} and {{{expr}}} can often be used.

For example, to remove the filename extension part:

{{{#!highlight sh
for file in ./*.doc
do
    base=`echo "$file" | sed 's/\.[^.]*$//'`    # remove everything starting with last '.'
    mv "$file" "$base".txt
done
}}}

Another example, this time to remove the last character of a variable:

{{{#!highlight sh
var=`expr "$var" : '\(.*\).'`
}}}

or (using {{{sed}}}):

{{{
    var=`echo "$var" | sed 's/.$//'`
}}}