Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi guys,

I have been trying to play with sed to accomplish this but I just can't quite get it right.

I need to be able to remove the year from a string held in a variable in my bash script.

The string may have multiple words but always ends with a year such as (2009)

for example:

oneword (2009)
two words (1999)
three or more words (2001)

I basically want to remove the year (the actual year varies) from these strings and keep the text, with no space at the end if possible.

Thanks guys,
Rob

Try :

NEW_VAR = `echo $VAR | cut -d"(" -f1`

Code:

$ cat strip.bash
#!/bin/bash

VAR="oneword (2009)"
echo "VAR=[$VAR]"

VAR=$(echo $VAR|perl -pe's/ \(\d+\)$//')

echo "VAR=[$VAR]"

exit 0

$ ./strip.bash
VAR=[oneword (2009)]
VAR=[oneword]