Shell Programming and Scripting

Then you might as well use:

Code:

echo "${string%_*}.TXT"

Yes, unless they're trying to guarantee that if a file that has already been processed slips into the mix again, another underscore and string of letters won't be deleted. (If this might happen, it is much easier to strip off an extra .txt from the end of the resulting string than it is to recreate an alphabetic string that was accidentally removed.)

Since skatpally hasn't shown us how the data to be processed is created and hasn't given us any indication of what will be done with the transformed data, it is hard to guess what kinds of precautions, if any, should be taken to verify that the input data is in the proper format.

You win, got the last word in terse!

Validation of dates, loosely, would be to add '[01][0-9][0-3][0-9]20[01][0-9]' for 2000-2019. Works in regex as well as file glob patterns.