<> == 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 "$var" | sed 's/.$//'` }}}