On Thursday 18 September 2003 2:32 pm, MJ Ray wrote:

...

I'm looping through a list of words in a file, passed in as  variables, and  performing an action on it,  but first I need to strip the ".ipk"  from the  word.

That's a different problem to the one you asked.  If the word is stored in the variable $word, then ${word/%.ipk/} will contain what you need in bash.  If you're using another shell, let me know.

That's exactly what I was after - many thanks. I later realised the filename also had to have a version number stripped from it, but the above syntax took care of that as well, with a small amount of twiddling. Jen