Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi
Is there a way to cut the last two characters off a word or number given that this word or number can be of varying length?

I have tried something like

TEST=`echo $OLD | cut -c 1-5`

where $OLD is a variable containing a number like 1234567 which gives a result of 12345. This is fine but what if the value of $OLD is longer or shorter?
I only want to always remove the last two digits or characters from a number or a word.
Examples:
123 becomes 1
12345 becomes 123
1234567 becomes 12345
cold besomes co
hot becomes h
etc....

THNX

Code:

TEST=`echo $OLD | sed 's/..$//'`

Code:

echo please input
read str
echo $str
echo $str | awk '{print substr("'"$str"'",1,length("'"$str"'")-2)}'

Code:

# var=12345676776
# echo ${var%*??}
123456767

Thanks for your help peeps.. got that working