Anchor(faq74)

How do I get the effects of those nifty Bash Parameter Expansions in older shells?

The extended forms of ParameterSubstitution work with ["BASH"], KornShell, KornShell93, but not with the older BourneShell. If the 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: 

    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: 

    var=`expr "$var" : '\(.*\).'`

or (using sed): 

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